Human Cargo

by Caroline Moorehead

  “The Taliban were just starting to be powerful. I saw them in the streets, with their great turbans and their scissors to cut the hair of men they thought wore it too long. They stopped me all the time to ask if I had said my prayers. After a few days I found a way to go back to Bamiyan, but it was six years since I had left and my married sisters did not recognize me. I got ill and didn’t know what to do. I tried to get back into Iran, but I was stopped at the border and pushed back.”

  Jawal now had little choice but to find a home in Pakistan. He heard of a religious school in Peshawar, founded by an Iranian cleric, and for the next five years he lived and studied in the madrassa. He saw his parents only once: he got word that his father had had a stroke, so he slipped across the Iranian border by night to see him, returning the next day to the madrassa. Meanwhile, in Pakistan the mood was changing. Soon confrontations between the traditional religious teachers and their secular young pupils, who wanted to be taught to speak English and use computers, led to bitter fights and expulsions, Jawad was one of eighteen young men deemed to be troublemakers and expelled. He was trying his hand as an apprentice tailor when he met Aziz, an energetic and somewhat older Hazara, who was then in the process of setting up a school for Hazara weaving children in Peshawar. Aziz offered him a deal: he personally would coach the younger man in English and political science, if Jawad would join his school and teach the children to read and write.

  Jawad was one of the teachers whom Aziz sent on ahead, as the Taliban were pulling out of Kabul, to prepare for the transfer of the school back to Afghanistan. He found an abandoned and derelict building, bought some whitewash, acquired tables and chairs. In May 2002, the school traveled across the mountains in a truck, with its textbooks. The children missed just three days of schooling. “I am very anxious,” Jawad said to me. “I am anxious but also hopeful. I need a proper university education if I am to help my country. But I have too little time to study and no one to help me. I plan to become a lawyer. If we don’t have social justice, we will never become men for ourselves: our destiny will be that of people who carry wheels on their shoulders for others.”

  • • •

  IN 1836, LIEUTENANT Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes, visiting Kabul with a British military expedition, set out west from the city on a journey into the mountains. From Kareez-i-Meer, where he and his party halted for the first night, he noted in his journal that he could see, “in the hazy distance, a vast vista of gardens extending for some thirty or forty miles… No written description can do justice to this lovely and delightful country. Throughout the whole of our journey we had been lingering amidst beautiful orchards, the banks of which were clustered over with wild flowers and plants in profuse abundance.” Among the “wide spreading plane-trees” and the grapes, “which imparted a purple tinge to the hills,” Burnes spotted porcupines, hedgehogs, and marmots, though he observed, with his sportsman’s eye, that “everything that yields a fur” was hunted by the Afghans. What Burnes had seen was the fabled Shomali plain, the former orchards of Kabul, a rich plateau irrigated by deep wells and the snowmelt, which flowed along the qanats or channels buried far underground to water vineyards and fruit trees. Babur, the Moghul emperor Zahiruddin Mohammed, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, who spotted sixteen varieties of wild tulip growing in the hills around Kabul, one of which bore the scent of red roses, loved the Shomali plain and came, in the sixteenth century, while on his way to India, to picnic beneath its mulberry trees. There he remarked on the excellence of the quinces and plums, and observed that the valley was home to parrots, mynah birds, peacocks, and monkeys, and that the local people laid snares for migrating herons and cranes, in order to decorate their turbans with the feathers.

  But the Shomali plain was also where, during the 1980s and 1990s, the mujahedeen fought one another and the Soviets for the approaches to Kabul, and where the Taliban decreed a scorched-earth policy to level the ground for self-protection. Over a period of several years, acting alone or ordering others to do their work, the Taliban shelled the leafy Shomali villages into ruins, set fire to the vineyards to starve the economy, destroyed the avenues of planes and poplars to prevent the rebuilding of roofs, chopped down the mulberry trees that gave shade and fruit to passing strangers, dropped mines down the wells and qanats and laid them in the fields of wheat. The Shomali plain came to be a symbol of Taliban savagery. By the summer of 2002, when I saw it, it was a derelict, deserted, silent wilderness, broken only by the red printed warnings about unexploded mines, and by the clusters of green flags waving on the end of poles, each marking the grave of a martyr, a man who has died a violent death. It was a barren, desolate place.

  But not, as it turned out, entirely empty.

  Searching for signs of Babur’s earthly paradise, I saw two men, with white beards and flat felt Afghan hats, at work in a half-burned vineyard close to the main road north toward Mazar-e-Sharif. Behind them were the ruins of a once large village and the great stumps of what must have been a magnificent row of mulberry trees. The men were gently picking up unexploded shells and putting them on a pile, ready for collection by a demining agency working in the plain. It was hot and still and very dusty. The men were cousins.

  In the early 1980s, explained the older man, Haji Kamal, the village of Logar, named for the province of his great-grandfather, who had planted these lands, had been home to forty families, most of them related to one another. With its avenues of trees, its orchards of apricot, apple, plum, and pear, Logar had been a tranquil and shady place. Haji Kamal and his three brothers had owned, between them, 12,000 vines, from which they produced 600 sacks of raisins and many table grapes, sold in the bazaar in Kabul together with wheat, melons, maize, apricots, walnuts, and several kinds of cherries, as well as an abundance of the sugary white mulberries that the Afghans eat dried during the winter months. The Kandari red grapes were the sweetest, Haji Kamal told me, but not the most valuable; those were the white ones, which he dried slowly inside the house. He had grown eleven varieties of grape, drying most of them in the sun during the month of October, on the roof of his house or spread out on the ground. In the late 1970s, Chinese farming technicians had visited Logar and introduced pomegranates to the valley, and these, too, had made him a fine crop. Haji Kamal’s family, with his children and his brothers and their families, had grown to eighty people by the time the mujahedeen came, and they shared between them eight milking cows and a donkey, as well as a small tractor. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, he had just opened shops in Kandahar and Kabul, and made a deal to sell fifty tons of raisins each year to China.

  After the Soviet shelling began, and he began to fear for his family’s lives, Haji Kamal sent his wife and children to Pakistan. They left by truck at dawn, taking with them the cows. It was a morning so cold that there was heavy snow in the passes and one of his pregnant daughters lost her baby. He stayed on fighting with the mujahedeen, then joined his family in a rented house in Peshawar, where he sent his young sons, but not his daughters, to school, and from time to time he made the journey home across the mountains to check on his abandoned fields and crumbling house. Until the Taliban were defeated, he had not judged it safe to come back, but here he was now, with his cousin Amir Jan, also one of several brothers, planning, with the help of UNHCR and various foreign aid organizations, which were providing rafters and windows, to rebuild the compound in which they had once lived. In the years of exile his family had grown from eighty to two hundred people; but if the fields could be made fertile again, there would be enough food for them all.

  The two elderly cousins, with their lean bearded faces and elegant pale gray turbans, led me to see their compounds, now mounds of dust and rubble around the stumps of the mulberry trees that had once provided such dense green shade. In one, a large white tent, donated by UNHCR, sheltered some of the women and children who had returned with them; there was a cow, tethered to a pomegranate bush. It was a bleak but not despairing scene. The water from his wel
l alone, Haji Kamal said, gave him great pleasure: very cold and very pure, it reminded him that he had come home from his borrowed life in a rented room in Peshawar, where he had always felt hot and cramped. “Though I found everything ruined, I knelt down and kissed the ground. I don’t expect a harvest for two years. But at least we can walk along the road, in safety, even at night. We feel safe.”

  • • •

  BEFORE I LEFT Kabul, early one morning] went to watch the families arriving at the UNHCR reception center at Pulicharki, site of a notorious Taliban prison, under a fold of the tall ocher mountains. UNHCR has put up tents and hangars, where they hand out rations of wheat, buckets, bars of soap, and plastic sheets, and where doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières monitor the health of the new arrivals and vaccinate against measles and polio. UNHCR gives small sums of money to every returning refugee, though the aid agencies are conscious that they must not show too much favor to the refugees and thereby produce resentment among those who endured the Taliban years. The money men, who are all Afghan, supervised by UNHCR, sit cross-legged behind wire cages, counting out the dollars. One tent has been made into a simulated mine field, where families are walked past the weapons they might expect to find, unexploded, in their fields. Over the mountains to the east, in swirling bursts of dust, come the trucks, their painted sides catching the sun, swaying under their loads of mattresses and blankets, mats and sewing machines, bicycles and cooking pots, accumulated in exile. The families who climbed out talked about how hard life had been in Pakistan and about the perils of the journey during which they have been preyed on by police and guards in search of bribes. Farmers in the 1970s and 1980s, they have since become cobblers and builders, shopkeepers and mechanics. The young boys speak little, but the girls are bold: egging one another on, they talked of the education many have received and about their plans to become doctors and teachers in the new Afghanistan. A small, robust, outspoken girl of fourteen, who can remember almost nothing of their village and had spent ten years in a refugee camp, said that her plan was to attend Kabul University. On her head, she wore a plain scarf. “I am not in the habit of wearing a veil,” she said. By midday, the process of arrival was over; it had been an orderly, cheerful procedure. The morning’s 5,000 returnees, with their buckets and bars of soap, were on their way, by taxi or in the cars of relatives come to collect them, to discover what was left of home; or what they have come to call home, for it is said that more than half of all those “returning” to Afghanistan in 2002 were in fact born outside the country. The brightly decorated trucks and buses were climbing the mountain passes again, to collect more returning families.

  Before I caught my plane back to Dubai, Nasir took me to see a friend in government, Nabi Farahi, deputy minister of finance, whom he had known a quarter of a century earlier, when both were students at the university. Farahi sat out the Taliban years as a professor of Pashtu, lying low when others provoked the Taliban. A charming, bespectacled, bearded man in his sixties, he offered melon to counteract the intense heat of his unair-conditioned office, apologizing for the lack of elevator, telephone, computer, carpet, or fan. To wipe up the melon juice, he sent his assistant to fetch unused forms from previous governments. Farahi is appalled at the speed with which the refugees are coming home. “We have nothing for them yet,” he said. “No jobs, no houses. This country doesn’t work. It is too soon.” Like all Afghans in positions of some authority, he worries when he sees the few good jobs going to men who have come back from exile with skills those who stayed behind had no chance to learn, and at the way that the foreign aid organizations are casually poaching the best people with salaries that can run to fifty times those the bankrupt Afghan state can offer. “I would like to see some dignity in the way people are returning,” he said, licking melon juice from his fingers. “It is only chaos.” It was Farahi who first mentioned to me the resentment many Afghans feel about how so much money has been promised, and so little visibly delivered.

  Within six months, well over a million people had heeded Karzai’s calls and UNHCR’s promises and come home; this was more than had been expected for the entire year. At this rate, there would be 2 million by the time the snows came, returned to a country without houses, roads, schools, hospitals, water, or electricity. “I see our job as software,” said a man working for the UN. “We are trying to provide the rewiring of the system, but we will not be here to run it. The Afghans have to learn to do it for themselves.” For their part, the Afghans fear that the West will not fulfill its promises. As they watch the Land Cruisers speeding along the dusty roads, they remind one another that the West had promised things before, when they wanted the Soviets out, but that once the Soviets had gone, the West did not seem quite as committed as before.

  Out on the Shomali plain, Haji Kamal is very conscious of the fragility of the transitional government and the power of the encircling warlords, and of the coming winter, when snow, and winds no longer broken by trees, will turn his valley into a harsh and forbidding place. It was in the next few months, he said, that Afghanistan’s future would be decided.

  • • •

  ALMOST EXACTLY A year later, I went back to Afghanistan to see how the refugees had survived their first winter. I wanted to find Abdul, the ebullient small boy who had led me through the dusty alleys of West Kabul; to see whether Jawad had won his place at the university; and whether Haji Kamal and Amar Jan had rebuilt their houses in the Shomali plain and were growing grapes for raisins once again. I had heard that the Hazara weavers’ school was flourishing. Nasir, to whom I spoke from time to time on the telephone, told me that he had reoccupied his family home in the center of Kabul, but that there was nothing but confusion over the awarding of the lucrative contracts for roads, telephones, and electricity. He was still hesitating, flying in and out of Kabul on Ariana’s ancient jet, trying to gauge the stability of the new Afghanistan. He could not quite make up his mind how far to commit himself, he kept saying, over the crackling line. Money was pouring into the city, houses were being built and fetching enormous rents, but there was no certainty anywhere. No one felt safe. Only the foreign aid specialists, he said, seemed in control, and even they would soon be leaving.

  Flying in low over the bare mountains, I found the airport still pitted with shell holes, the burned-out tanks still in their places along the runways. Inside the terminal, the chaos was unchanged, but pictures of General Masood, the Northern Alliance warlord assassinated in the closing days of Taliban power, have replaced the earlier notices about land mines. On my plane were two middle-aged Afghan brothers. They had fled the city twenty-four years before and were now bringing the body of their father home for burial in a Kabul he had never been able to visit in his long years in exile. They were uneasy, talkative. In their pockets were the deeds to the family house, long since occupied by others, over which they anticipated one of the fierce property wrangles in which many returnees have been ensnared.

  We landed in Kabul soon after a flight from Frankfurt, bearing additional prosperous returnees, businessmen and engineers and academics who have made lives in the West and were now, like my friend Nasir, coming back to see the lay of the land. An elegant Afghan woman in her forties, with many trunks, dressed in a stylish combination of Afghan and Western dress, struggled to find her luggage. “Entshuldige” (Sorry), she was saying loudly, pushing her way through the Afghan porters with their turbans and flat hats, “Entshuldige, entshuldige” A young Afghan man with a strong American accent, crew cut, cocky, and bemused, was telling all who will listen that this was his first visit to Kabul and that he had come to meet a grandmother he had never seen. His real name is Mohamed, but he likes to be called Mo. Born and bred in Manhattan, Mo was incredulous and a little scornful of the chaos. “This is not really my place, you know. I don’t belong here.”

  Kabul, I wrote that night in my diary, has changed little in a year. There is more razor wire on foreign and United Nations buildings; there are more women wearing burq
as, a sign of the diminished faith most Afghans now have in an independent future in which women would be free to be bold. The crowds are thicker and the city is dirtier and dustier, Kabul’s population having apparently doubled to 2.5 million people. And the Land Cruisers are now lost in a permanent traffic jam of taxis, trucks, old cars, donkeys, and bicycles. The pollution is so bad that to live in Kabul, it is said by foreign residents, is to smoke the equivalent of forty-five packs of cigarettes a day. There are many more beggars, mostly women in burqas with babies, and small boys are selling tattered copies of a U.S. Marine training manual by the roadside. A hundred thousand returnees are apparently squatting in the ruins of the city, destitute. Afghanistan is still, in the language of the aid world, a SCCPI, a “situation of chronic conflict and political instability,” its people short of food and vulnerable to disease, physical assault, and forced displacement.

  But there are roses out along the avenues leading into the city, and over a garden wall I saw a pink lavatera in flower. The fruit sellers have watermelons and mangoes, and the policeman was still where I had left him, directing traffic from a purple plush sofa, perched on a raised dais in the middle of the road. In the UN compounds geraniums and zinnias are growing, watered by channels cut out of the earth, and in the bazaar are new photograph shops, showing the unveiled faces of young women. Masood’s hawklike, brooding, unsmiling face is on every billboard.

  Though the city is bustling and full of energy, in a state of constant rebuilding and activity, the refugees, it is said, have become cautious. When the snows had melted and the migrations began again, in March 2003, they did not flock home in anything like the same numbers as the previous year and as it had been feared they would. They have neither been pushed by increased intolerance in Pakistan and Iran, nor pulled by promises of work and houses. The tales of resettlement that have traveled back over the mountains have not been altogether happy ones, and the numbers arriving at Pulicharki daily in their brightly painted buses are said by the UN to be down to six hundred. Also, something has been done to curb those who traveled back and forth over the border, again and again, each time collecting money and rations, soap and plastic sheeting from the World Food Programme and UNHCR. A sophisticated machine that photographs the iris of each returnee and keeps a print on a database has been introduced.