The Sewing Circles of Herat

by Christina Lamb

  I asked him about the ISI’s involvement with the Taliban. ‘When the Taliban first appeared on the scene I thought it was some kind of conspiracy against jihad’, he replied. ‘It really was spontaneous; the response of the Afghan people to the devaluation of jihad. But then I went to Kabul and saw what they were doing, urbanisation, bringing peace, clamping down on heroin and I couldn’t believe it. Hekmatyar hadn’t worked out as we had hoped and this seemed to be a good alternative.

  ‘What I would like is to see a similar set-up in Pakistan. Conditions here are similar, the governments have repeatedly failed, people feel they have no protection of their life and property; they are fed up with corruption. The Taliban are not corrupt.’

  Why had the Taliban collapsed so easily then, I asked. ‘It’s not over,’ he replied. ‘The Russians lost in ten years, the Americans will lose in five. They are chocolate cream soldiers. All this “Get Him” type mood will subside.’

  I had been putting off the real question and he knew it. The interview is finished,’ he said abruptly, standing up, ‘it’s time for prayers.’ My heart was thumping but I could not leave. ‘Before I go there’s one more question I must ask,’ I said. ‘I want to know why you had me interrogated and deported.’ I had wanted to stay calm but my voice rose. ‘I was just doing my job. You know that. Why did you do it?’

  The general’s eyes flashed with anger and for a moment I thought he was going to have me thrown out. ‘Do you know Miss Lamb, it’s a mystery,’ he replied, the mask of politeness dropped. ‘I had it all thoroughly checked out. I had my best people investigate. They concluded it must have been rogue elements.’

  Rogue elements? Was that his explanation for the small boy who had lost his entire family in a rocket attack screaming to the heavens in Jalalabad as cluster bombs fell all around him? Or for the death of Abdul Haq, who had been captured by the Taliban near Jalalabad and executed, calling the US airforce on his satellite phone as he was surrounded but too late. His family later told me they believed the Taliban authorities had been tipped off by the ISI.

  So many people had blood on their hands over Afghanistan, probably nobody came out of it well, from the commanders who had enriched themselves, to the journalists who had tried to make their name then moved on to other ‘sexier’ wars, to the foreign powers who used the mujaheddin as Cold War proxies than abandoned them. ‘The aftermath of victory was a shameful betrayal of the Afghan people by the US’ says Bud McFarlane, who was Reagan’s National Security Advisor from 1983–5. But on that bright autumn day in Rawalpindi, as I looked back and saw the general standing at his door laughing, I saw a man who had tried to play God with the fates of innocent people in another country because his own country had failed to live up to its promise.

  1 Most of the weapons were transported to a warehouse near Rawalpindi, in Ojheri, the headquarters of the ISI’s Afghan unit. The warehouse was mysteriously blown up in 1988 just before the first CIA audit was due to take place.

  2 For each plane confirmed downed by a Stinger missile, the commander received two more Stingers.

  3 Interview with author at Benazir Bhutto’s home in London, August 2002.

  10

  A Letter from Kabul

  ‘Look at your eyes. They are small but they see enormous things.’

  RUMI

  I STARTED LOOKING FOR MARRI on the first day of the Eid holiday. It was a sparkling blue day almost the colour of the dome of Queen Gowhar Shad’s tomb in Herat, broken up only by the handful of pearly clouds over the Hindu Kush that would bring the next day’s rain. Everyone in Kabul seemed to be out visiting, imp-faced boys playing with Eid presents of plastic helicopters or paper kites, and doll-like girls in embroidered dresses of vivid oranges, purples and pinks with velvet bows in their hair and daubs of rouge on their cheeks. Most were olive-skinned with raven hair and eyes but every so often I would see a fairer one with eyes like limpid green pools, and it was terrible to think that such exquisite faces would soon be hidden away behind purdah or inside burqas. People often likened the burqa to a birdcage but even through the bars of a cage one could still admire the beauty of the bird inside and listen to its song.

  In my bag I had the grubby envelopes bearing the letters that Marri had risked her life to smuggle out to me in Pakistan. Written in rounded childish hand on sheets torn from an exercise book, I had read and re-read her account of the horrors of being an educated Kabuli woman trapped in a burqa and kept recalling her words; ‘maybe when you watch the bombs on television you will think of me and know we are real feeling people here, a girl who likes to wear red lipstick and dreams of dancing, not just the men of beards and guns’.

  She had written that she lived in New Microrayon, a large housing estate in the east of Kabul near the airport. Although I did not have the exact address – the block and apartment number written on the envelope were wrong in case it had fallen into enemy hands – I thought I would start in that area as she could not live far away. I knew that her real name was Fatema Siddiqui, her father a former diplomat and mother a teacher, that she was about thirty and single, and had a younger sister and two brothers, and I was confident that I would find her.

  Kabul is situated in a large valley surrounded with mountains that rise up from the plains here and there, the Kabul River meandering in between. In a taxi I headed east along the river past a stall where a man was sitting on the ground stencilling black capitals spelling out the word ‘Police’ on a pile of white builders’ helmets and a small group of men were holding down a goat and slitting its neck, the dark blood squirting onto the ground.

  Eventually in the shadow of the Maranjan Mountain, Microrayon came into view and my confidence of finding Marri began to ebb. Stretching for as far as the eye could see across the bleached soil were row after row of concrete Eastern European-style apartment blocks. Built partly under King Zahir Shah and the rest under the Soviets for middle-class Kabulis such as teachers, government servants and doctors, it was a vast depressing place that housed 140,000 people.

  The estate had been on the front-line during the mujaheddin fighting between 1992–4, captured by General Dostum’s Uzbek militia, then by Massoud’s men and finally revenge-rocketed by Hekmatyar’s forces. Almost every building was riddled with black bullet holes while some floors had collapsed in rocket attacks or were sagging perilously. A survey from Kabul University of one eight-block section each with forty-eight apartments, found that half of the families had fled between 1992 and 1996. 50,000 Kabulis were killed in those years and in some periods a thousand people were leaving each day, part of an exodus of 300,000 from the city, fleeing the relentless killing and destruction.

  Apart from the wounds of war, the rank smell and piles of rubbish suggested it was years since the estate had seen any public services. The doors had all been torn off the entrances, perhaps used as firewood, the stairways were dirty and unlit and the glass had been blasted out of all the windows. Black smoke was coming out of some of the apartments from paraffin stoves.

  Yet there was a gaiety about the place as people celebrated the first Eid after the fall of the Taliban. Makeshift fairgrounds had been set up on patches of wasteland between blocks. In one, children were riding on a carousel, which on closer inspection turned out to be made of parts of tanks and armoured personnel carriers with seats from machine gun emplacements. In another there was a miniature Ferris wheel of blocks of crudely cut wood roped together. Stalls had been set up selling cheap Chinese-made plastic toys, boxes of bangles in every colour of the rainbow, and improvised ice-lollies of frozen sherbet in polythene bags for children to buy with their Eid pennies.

  In the area known as New Microrayon, which seemed indistinguishable from the rest of Microrayon, I asked the driver to stop in front of a block numbered 153, graffiti-painted with the words ‘Nike’ and ‘Titanic’, suggesting somebody spoke English. As I stepped out of the taxi, the soil crunched underfoot. I thought the ground was hard from the cold then realised it was embed
ded with little broken fragments of building, and so many spent ammunition rounds that children had obviously stopped collecting them.

  Instead of doors, most apartments had corrugated iron sheets padlocked into place, and in block 153 these were scribbled with white chalk to say that the inhabitants had received a bag of wheat from the World Food Programme the previous week. It was less than a month since the Taliban had departed and people were suspicious to see a foreign woman at the door with a strange story about a letter. But the traditional Afghan hospitality won out and at every apartment that I knocked asking about Marri, the people insisted that I came in and eat Eid biscuits or sugared almonds washed down with green or black tea from large Chinese flasks.

  It would have been rude to decline and I was interested to see how they lived so I took off my boots and went in. Middle-class in Afghan terms would be poor in just about any other country. The apartments might have been modern in the 1960s and 1970s when they were built, but the country had regressed many years since then and they had no windows or heating. Water that had once run from taps was collected from a well; cooking was done on kerosene stoves on the ground. Oil lamps stood on tables and in several apartments there were chickens in wooden cages. I saw no books. But many had old-fashioned black and white televisions and the government had arranged electricity to the city for three hours that morning so the population could watch a lengthy Eid speech by the outgoing President Rabbani followed by a group of men sitting under a tree drumming. In one apartment they had even fashioned a satellite dish of flattened Pepsi cans which they were about to fix to the roof.

  To start with my quest seemed to be going well. I was soon told of a Fatema Siddiqui in block 141 who was a teacher. A woman with light green eyes, a gauzy veil of deep pink over her hair, answered the door and for a moment I thought it was my Fatema. But she looked too old and then her children appeared, three girls and a boy. She insisted I came in and showed me into a room with a large quilt raised up on a stool in the middle and spread right across the floor, which she indicated I should put my feet under. It was surprisingly snug; this was a makeshift heating system known as a sandalee and there was a box of charcoal burning beneath the stool which warmed the quilt during the day to then be slept under at night, though after a while the charcoal fumes became quite suffocating.

  On the wall were framed photographs of a man in uniform and in a glass cabinet a peaked cap and a medal, and as we sat on the floor, chewing toffees from glass dishes, she explained that she was the widow of a general in the Afghan army who had been sacked by the Taliban then one day never came home again. ‘I later heard that he had died,’ she told me matter-of-factly, ‘the Taliban dragged him off the street and beat him and he had a bad heart.’ She received no pension, earning a little money from teaching. In the doorway her three daughters hovered shyly, beautiful in their embroidered dresses with silver bangles, staring out from under deep black fringes. Every time they caught me looking at them they would run away until eventually Fatema called in the eldest, Mughan, who told me that she was eleven and had never been to school. ‘But I will go now the Taliban have gone,’ she said, ‘I want to be a doctor.’

  I asked to look in the kitchen. I had read a UNICEF study of war widows in Kabul, which found that they survived on a diet of green tea, nan bread and a little yoghurt. In Fatema’s kitchen there was one onion, some rice, a bucket of water, the remainder of the wheat donation from the previous week and a small plastic bag of sugar, which she told me one of her pupils had brought.

  As she showed me out, protesting at my refusal to stay for lunch, a groaning sound came from another room. Fatema lifted a curtain to reveal several piles of bedding on the floor on one of which lay an old woman with milky film over unseeing eyes.

  ‘My mother,’ she said. ‘My father was killed in a rocket attack just outside. One night when the fighting was so bad there were flames in the sky, my little brother had run outside and my father ran after him.’

  Fatema told me that there was another lady who gave secret English classes not far away in block 146 so I decided to try there. This time the door was opened by a slender woman with laughing eyes and tight jeans who was clearly too young to be Marri. Sonita Nawabi was just nineteen and the youngest of a family of six, none of whom were called Fatema or Marri. But she was desperate to practise her English with a foreigner and almost physically dragged me inside. She told me that she was twelve when the Taliban had come and closed down all the schools but had taught herself English from books and she was very excited because she had just been accepted to start working as a presenter for Afghan television.

  Her happiness was infectious. ‘When a bird is in a cage and you free it, it sings songs of pleasure day and night,’ she explained. ‘For all these years I couldn’t even dare dream. Now I want to see all the world, to see all the people, how they look like. I have lots of ambition but we don’t have any opportunity.’

  Unfortunately, she did not know any Fatema Siddiquis. I had assumed that on an estate in a country with such a strong community spirit as Afghanistan, everyone would know everyone else but Sonita pointed out, ‘There have been constant comings and goings in Kabul, particularly Microrayon. Thousands of families fled during the mujaheddin fighting and thousands more when the Taliban came. And you know we women have been locked away for more than five years and did not know whom we could trust. No one knows the women. We are like the invisible species. I don’t even know who are the women living upstairs.’

  She suggested going to see a man called Mohammed Hamid who she said had been involved with the resistance. He was a thin worried-looking individual with pale skin and a small brown beard carrying a baby tightly wrapped in swaddling, and he seemed very suspicious, asking what I wanted with Marri. Eventually he revealed that he had indeed known her as she would come to his house to take messages for her father who was a spy for the anti-Taliban forces but he did not know where she lived as these were secret missions. He promised that he would try to find out and told us to come back at 11 a.m. the next day.

  He set off looking purposeful but my interpreter Toryali was sceptical. ‘He is pretending he knows her,’ he said.

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘To appear a more important person.’

  Everyone I had met on the estate had told me that the Taliban had fled so I was surprised when I was shown into another apartment by a small boy and a man with a long beard and a black turban came and sat down on the floor, legs crossed. I decided not to tell him about Marri. He was hard of hearing and leaned close to me as I explained I was a journalist getting views about the new government. He told me he was a high court judge for the new regime and launched into a passionate defence of Islamic punishments such as amputations for thieves and stonings of women accused of adultery. Describing himself as a liberal, he explained, ‘I will order the use of small stones so they have more chance to escape.’

  His neighbour was a flight engineer for Ariana, the national airline on which I had flown from Herat, a hair-raising journey over the snowy Bamiyan mountains during which the pilot invited me into the cockpit and showed me that all his instruments were broken. ‘So how are you navigating?’ I asked. ‘By vision,’ he replied.

  The flight engineer told me that he had more than once had Osama bin Laden on his plane. ‘He used Ariana like his personal airline. Once we had to go to Sudan to pick up some of his friends and family for a wedding.’

  He was angry about the American bombing which had destroyed Kabul airport and blown up the entire Ariana fleet except for the Antonov on which I had flown and one old 737 that they knew could make it to Europe because it had been hijacked to London the previous year. ‘The Pakistanis are the real terrorists,’ he said. ‘They were worse than the Russians because the Russians came here as men, as enemies, whereas the Pakistanis pretended to be our friends but sent all their fundamentalists here. They have the training camps, the finances, why isn’t the West bombing them instead o
f us?’

  ‘Come with me.’ He led me downstairs and across a path into a walled yard. Inside was a burnt-out bus. On the side, he traced the remains of the red letters ‘AfghanTour’.

  ‘You see a country of mud and ruin but before we had tourists, foreigners travelled all over the country, we had so many wonders, the giant Buddhas, castles, minarets, mountain lakes and they were so happy to see such things. Now the Taliban and the Pakistanis have tried to dry up our waters and destroy this history but they cannot destroy our memory. The father remembers for the son and the son for his son.’

  No one seemed to have escaped untouched by war. Everyone I met wanted to know what the outside world thought of Afghanistan, worried that they would all be seen as terrorists, and I regretted not taking along a picture of the Twin Towers. ‘Could one building really have so many thousands of people?’ I kept being asked. ‘How is it possible?’

  But after a while I was exhausted by endless glasses of tea and fending off gifts from people who clearly could not afford it, and we had still only checked out a few blocks. I felt like the Pied Piper, a growing crowd of children following me, laughing and chattering so loudly that it was becoming impossible to hear anything, and the hapless Toryali’s attempts at dispersing them by whistling seemed to only encourage them. The special Eid morning electricity had finished and my hands and feet were numb. However the concept of being in a hurry was one that Toryali was clearly having difficulty explaining. ‘Stay to lunch’, ‘Stay to dinner’, ‘Stay the night’, came the refrain from everyone we met. I imagined an Afghan woman turning up on a doorstep in my neighbourhood of north London with some tale about a letter and what kind of reception she might get.