In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

by SAIMA WAHAB

  I went to the hospital to see Angelee every day for almost a week, but one morning I arrived to find her bed empty. I asked around, thinking maybe her mother had come back for her after all, but the medic told me that a day earlier a man had shown up saying he was the girl’s uncle.

  He said the girl’s mother and father had both died of infection from their burns.

  “Are you sure he was her uncle?” I asked.

  The medic shrugged. “He said he was. We didn’t have any choice but to release her. We couldn’t just keep her here forever.”

  I hurried back to my B-hut, avoiding the clusters of Farsiban interpreters who stood around smoking and chatting. I stared at the ground as I rushed by them, hoping they wouldn’t stop me to chat. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I tried to feel optimistic. I, too, had had caring uncles as a child. Eventually they turned on me, but when I was Angelee’s age, they had taken me in. I chose to hope that, since Angelee’s uncle had come all the way to an American installation to pick her up, he would be good to her, or at least try to protect her for as long as he could from the cruelties of an Afghan world.

  THIRTEEN

  One late afternoon I was packing up a box of gravel to send to Najiba when the site manager knocked on the door of the B-hut. I opened the door for him to come into the little space that was serving as a living room. I could tell by the look on his face that he had no clue why I was sending home a box full of rocks. I explained how I talked to my mother and sister every night, and how I told them that the ground beneath my feet was covered with rocks that looked like diamonds. “I’m sending them some,” I said, “so they can have a piece of Afghanistan in Portland, Oregon.”

  I was transfixed by this gravel. When the sun was at a certain angle the reflection was blinding. I couldn’t look away. Outside the base there was a huge pile of the stuff, used for surfacing the walkways and paths of every base, the expedient—and politically practical—alternative to paving. To pave a road in one of the American bases in Afghanistan means you are here to stay. In the Afghan mind, pavement equals permanence, and that was not a message the United States wanted to convey. Over the years the gravel would grow dirty, but in the winter of 2005 it was still fresh, clean, and promising.

  The site manager looked at me blankly. He’d advised me several times to “keep myself busy and entertained” while I was waiting at BAF, but from the look on his face I could tell that sending rocks home to my family was not what he had had in mind.

  “You’re going to Farah,” he said.

  “They do know that I’m here to speak Pashtu, and that Farah is a Farsiban province?” I admit my tone might have been that of a know-it-all.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that you’re approved to go to Farah as soon as you can get there.”

  I took my package of gravel to the post office on base and hurried back. I wasn’t 100 percent sure where Farah was, just that it was on the border with Iran. I had to consult a map. Seeing how far west it was, all I could imagine was the wide-open space, the glorious heat. I love heat. I stuffed all my clothes into my duffel bag and rushed to the terminal, hoping to catch the next flight out. I sat for six hours, waiting to be called, but there was no flight that day.

  I wasn’t sure why I was being sent to Farah. During the orientation in Virginia I was given no real information about what I would be doing—no handbook, no packet, no FAQ brochure. As contractors, we were simply supposed to allow ourselves to be herded along.

  Much later I would learn that asking questions like Do you know what I’m going to be translating? Or, Where am I going to end up? Or, If I’m in the middle of a meeting and there’s a firefight, what am I supposed to do? will get you labeled as a difficult interpreter. Asking questions as I did, questions like You do know we’re Afghans, right? Why are you wasting our time and yours teaching us about Afghan culture? will brand you as a troublemaker. And troublemakers were sent to far-flung outposts, where it was assumed no one of sound mind would want to work, and where they couldn’t ask too many questions or raise too many red flags.

  I called Greg and told him I was shipping out. Since our meeting in Fairfax he’d decided to apply for a job in Afghanistan, working as a contract manager for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). He was adamant, saying he didn’t care if the country was at war, he was willing to leave everything behind to be with me. He’d been processing out in Houston for a month, and now he was on his way to BAF. Even though he didn’t lose his temper—he never did—I could hear the disbelief in his voice.

  “I’m coming all the way to Bagram to be with you and you’re leaving Bagram?”

  “I don’t have any say in it, Greg. I signed up to go anywhere they send me.”

  “Are you doing this just to get away from me? Is that what’s going on?”

  “Even if I didn’t go to Farah, they’d send me somewhere else. I’m here to work, not sit around BAF. That’s the whole point, to go where I’m needed.”

  Our relationship had become just another casualty of war. In the beginning, I had used the satellite phone several times a day to call him, but the more he asked me to come back home, the less I called. It was easier to e-mail, so I did, knowing well that e-mailing was not Greg’s strong point. So we started to drift apart, prompting him—I believe—to apply for a job at BAF.

  I called Mamai and told her I was headed to Farah. She was relieved. She listened to World News every day, just as my father had. I told her Farah was the safest place in the country, and in February 2005 it really was.

  I returned to the terminal the next day and the next. Finally, a Chinook helicopter was scheduled to depart early the following day. After dragging my suitcases back and forth to the PAX terminal for three days, in disgust, I decided to leave them behind. In the end, I was told that the plane could not carry too much cargo because it was already transporting mail, ammunition, and other containers, and that I could bring only essentials—my backpack with my toothbrush, toothpaste, and a change of clothes. I had the shoes on my feet. My site manager promised to put the rest of my stuff on the next plane to Farah. I would get the rest of my stuff almost three months later.

  We took off after midnight. Flying by night wouldn’t save us from being hit by a heat-seeking RPG, but it would lessen our chances of being clipped by an insurgent crouched on a hillside with a Kalashnikov. I only understood this later. At the time I thought it was just another case of the army’s inexplicable way of doing things. I wore my heaviest coat, but it wasn’t heavy enough for a winter Afghan night in a Chinook. We flew all night, ascending and descending, zigzagging across the country, dropping off food and ammunition, refueling, picking up and dropping off soldiers at bases in Jalalabad, Khost, Gardez, and Kandahar before we finally made it to Farah.

  From the air, the Farah Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) looked like a piece of circuitry—a gray rectangle studded with flecks of beige and green. It sat in the middle of a wide valley amid outcroppings of rust-colored rocks. The soldiers called it “Fort Apache,” which I understood as having something to do with the Wild West. It was a no-man’s-land in the blasted desert of a desert nation, with scorpions, venomous snakes, and swirling sandstorms that obscured the tall, craggy mountains looming on the horizon. The only things that grew here were a few saplings and the candy-colored poppies that provide most of the world’s opium.

  We deplaned into a dust cloud. I pulled the collar of my jacket over my nose to keep from inhaling the dust. A female army specialist picked me up in a little truck and took me to my room, a cement structure I would share with her and two other female soldiers. I dropped my backpack by the only unoccupied bed and rushed back outside. I stood in the dusty haze and stared at the distant mountains. They were every shade of orange in the morning light. It was just past dawn, but already I could tell it was going to be much warmer than BAF, which cheered and energized me after the long night of freezing travel. The desert climate was extreme, but I felt comforted by t
he presence of the bare orange mountains looking down on me.

  Farah was a tiny PRT in the middle of a vast plain. The first unit ever in the area was still there when I arrived. When a PRT or an FOB opens, the first order of business is to establish the perimeter around the area by assembling the HESCOs, as the steel-mesh containers filled with rocks, gravel, and dirt that create a thick wall of protection are called. When I arrived at Farah, the HESCOs were all in place, and there were five guard towers, so brand-new that the paint was still wet; the foundations for a few buildings were still being poured. Farah PRT was so small and cozy that everyone knew one another. It felt to me like one big extended family, much like an Afghan family. I could tell they all belonged to the same tribe by the way they dressed, behaved, and spoke. The U.S. Army tribe. I was not sure, as a civilian, that I would be welcomed.

  When I arrived at BAF I knew I was going to work with a PRT, but I had no idea what a PRT did.

  After routing the Taliban in 2001 the United States realized that, in order to stabilize the country and begin to rebuild the remote regions (90 percent of the country qualifies as remote), operating bases would need to be established across the country. The PRT employs a mix of U.S. military personnel and civilians to oversee the reconstruction of schools, clinics, roads, and water-supply systems; now the PRT has evolved to mentor the Afghan governmental officials at the provincial level and to some degree do the same for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the collective title for the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police, and any other national security forces. Most important, the PRT is supposed to link up the Afghan public with the central government in Kabul. And, of course, an unofficial function of U.S. PRTs is acting as a friendly link between the coalition forces and the Afghan people. Another unofficial function that the locals had assigned to the PRT, and one that hasn’t changed to this day, is to provide Afghans with a place to come and complain about the corruption and ineptness of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA).

  During the years I spent in Afghanistan the mandate of the PRT changed. In 2005 the focus was on reconstruction and, on a smaller scale, development. PRTs used their tiny budgets to build and rebuild structures for the local government. As time passed, the locals grew to rely on the PRT to provide not only the buildings but also the services that should have been provided by the Afghan government. We were expected to fund and train the teachers for the schools and the medical personnel for the clinics and hospitals we built in the middle of the villages too remote for the central government to even know they existed.

  The balance between offering assistance and supporting the country is precarious. To avoid any appearance of trying to replace the GIRoA, the PRT mission evolved. Our focus shifted to mentoring Afghan government officials and helping them serve the public’s need for reconstruction and development. The transition wasn’t easy. Prior to the new mandate, Afghans had been taught to put in a request at the PRT for a new school or clinic; within days a Civil Affairs Team (CAT) would show up for an assessment. Under the new system, they were told to submit the request at the office of the governor or subgovernor. It would take months to get a response, if they received one at all. The Afghans would then return to the PRT, complaining that their own government had been unresponsive and expecting the PRT to step in on their behalf.

  The system had other flaws, as well. Simply put, the job of the PRT commander was to mentor the local governor, and the job of the company commander, who answered to the PRT commander, was to mentor the subgovernors. The mission sounded reasonable, in theory. In practice, it was another story. It might work with the right PRT commander because he is older and has more experience. But how could the military expect a twenty-six-year-old officer whose primary responsibility was to ensure the safety of the two dozen soldiers in his company, making sure they returned home to their families as unscathed as possible, to “mentor” an Afghan subgovernor?

  A typical relationship between the U.S. Army and an Afghan official plays out something like this: Most likely, the subgovernor was appointed because he was the governor’s crony. He knows little, if anything, about how to govern. He might not even know what’s going on in his own district. The company commander who’s supposed to teach him his job has had little, if any, training in governance in the United States, let alone governance in a foreign culture such as Afghanistan. He doesn’t know the first thing about running an Afghan province and probably knows even less about Islam, which is heavily intertwined with the Afghan constitution as far as the villagers are concerned.

  Still, the company commander tries to set up a meeting. It’s the first step. The subgovernor hems and haws, makes excuses. He tells the company commander that he has to go to the doctor in Kabul. He says one of his relatives has died. Most often, it is a female relative, because how would an American company commander be able to confirm this? How would the commander know how many female relatives the subgovernor has? How would anyone know?

  He’s full of excuses for why it will be difficult to meet. He knows the Americans are supposed to help, but he doesn’t want a meeting. It’s not safe. Most of the people in his province don’t know who their subgovernor is. They don’t care. If he hosts a meeting with the Americans, word will get out. Gossip will spread. Within hours the insurgents will know his name. Anyone connected with the Afghan government, anyone connected with promoting their cause, will become a target. If and when he finally agrees to meet, he knows he is putting a bull’s-eye on his own back. The subgovernor, while he might be uneducated, is not stupid. Even though he is a marked man, he knows that the more ineffectual he is, the longer he will live. His goal becomes not governance but doing as little as possible for as long as possible to avoid assassination while continuing to receive a nice paycheck, plus all the potential bribes—an unadvertised bonus of most official positions in Afghanistan.

  The subgovernor’s refusing to be seen out connecting with the constituents of his district but still fighting opponents for the seat might land this subgovernor on a satirical news program like The Daily Show back in the States, but in Afghanistan it is the root of all that has gone wrong the last decade. Enter into this mess a U.S. PRT, whose purpose is to connect the Afghans to this ineffectual and corrupt subgovernor. In the mind of the average Afghan, this has created a fundamental, deep-seated distrust of Americans. However simple they may seem to people of the first world, the villagers know what’s going on in their own country. Why wouldn’t they doubt the United States’ good intentions when the United States is encouraging the Afghans to connect with a government that’s stupendously incompetent and equally corrupt?

  AFTER A FEW weeks, when it became clear that my suitcase wasn’t going to be catching up with me anytime soon, I asked the PRT acting commander whether I could go outside the wire to the local bazaar and buy some things I needed. This was a normal enough request in March 2005. The country, newly purged of Taliban, was safer than ever.

  Major Carrillo, the tall and handsome Hispanic deputy commanding officer (DCO), flashed me a white-toothed grin and said, “Sounds like you’re feeling adventurous, Saima. We should make it a mission, to get out there and meet some of the locals, too.”

  The next morning I set out for the Farah bazaar with a dozen soldiers and two CAT I interpreters, named Omar and Johnny Cash. For personal security reasons, most CAT I and II interpreters don’t use their real names. A code name does double duty: It prevents anyone from tracking their names back to their family, which would make them a target for insurgents, and it makes it easier for American soldiers (who often have a hard time with foreign names) to remember them. Later, I, too, would have a code name, but in those early weeks back in Afghanistan I used my real name.

  The soldiers all wore desert camouflage (a shade of beige that matched the endless sand and every hut and wall constructed of it), interceptor body armor (IBA), heavy boots, helmets, sunglasses, and several radios for communicating with the PRT an
d one another. I wore a green, vaguely Afghan-looking tunic I had designed and sewn at home and a pair of jeans. I was thrilled to emerge and have the opportunity to engage with Afghans. By midmorning it was warm, verging on hot. Winter was on its way out. I felt the sun on my scalp as we stood by the convoy for the brief before leaving the wire.

  As we drove out of the Entry Control Point (ECP) and into the bazaar a couple of miles away, I noticed little kids running alongside the HMMWV (Humvee) screaming something. It was hard for me to understand them at first, but as more voices joined in, I was able to hear what they were saying, and it warmed my heart. “I love you! I love you!” they screamed. I felt as if all my fears about being judged by Afghans were silly. See? They loved me, and loved all of us. I can do this, I thought. I will be very good at what I am here to do, because how could I let these children down?

  The Farah bazaar was a sleepy huddle of narrow shops selling more or less the same items: groceries, shampoo, shoes, and fabric. The stalls were crowded beneath an overhang of corrugated metal, protecting the goods from the sun. A few shopkeepers wandered over, and a group of adorable little kids chased us, calling out, “Pen, mister! Pen, mister!” I felt a swell of pride that these Afghan children were begging us for pens and not chewing gum or candy, like my little cousins did back in the States. They were just so interested in educating themselves, I naïvely thought.

  I don’t know what the shopkeepers were thinking, but I could see the stunned looks on their faces when I asked them in Pashtu if they had shampoo. Over the years I had picked up little accents from Jalalabad, Peshawar, Kandahar, and of course my own Ghazni Pashtu, and I was using all four of those to make sure no one could pinpoint where I was from. This was a trick I had decided to use to make sure that no one harassed my family in Afghanistan because of what I was doing. Just as I spoke to the Afghans around me, I turned and spoke to the soldiers in English. The locals had seen female soldiers, but I wasn’t in uniform. Was I some sort of special guest? An ambassador, perhaps? The shopkeepers ducked their heads and grinned. One wondered aloud, in Pashtu, for the enjoyment of the growing crowd, “Is she Afghan? No, I think she is American. Listen to her speaking English to those American guys. She is not shy at all, and they are all listening to her and laughing with her like she is one of them.”