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

by SAIMA WAHAB

  They all asked the standard questions at once. Where was I from? What was my name? How did I know Pashtu? Why had they never heard of me? Why had they never seen me before?

  They asked whether I was married, and what my husband thought of what I was doing. I told them I was married, because they would wonder what I’d done to render myself unmarriageable. Did I sleep around? Was I an adulteress? they might wonder.

  I told them that I missed my kids. Still, I was happy to meet their children because they were just as bratty as my own brats back home. The elders laughed.

  They asked if I was there to find out what they wanted from the Americans. “No. I already know what you want. Clinics. Schools. Food. Clean water. Jobs. You want to feel safe in your community. You want our help, but you also want to be respected.”

  “You’ve been talking to a lot of Afghans,” said Red Beard.

  “I’ve been talking to a lot of Afghans,” I said, “but I am struggling to understand the root of the Pashtun problem. Why are you so unhappy? Why would you rather fight than live in peace?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I am the same as you,” I said. “As a Pashtun I have a long history, and that history has created an image that I sometimes feel obligated to maintain. The image is of the warrior who fights to the death to protect what is his. If I lived here, I would do that, just as you do. I would fight to the death to protect what is mine. But I am also American, and I see we have a great chance for Afghanistan to do so much better. We have the support of the most powerful country on earth, and also their dollars, to improve our lives and the lives of our children. Instead of seeing opportunity, you are obeying history, choosing to be insulted when these soldiers mean you no harm, but on the contrary are here, risking their lives, to help you.”

  Red Beard looked at me with ageless wisdom. “We don’t have much, but we are going to fight to keep the little bit that we do have. It’s important for our kids to go to school, but it’s more important, for us elders, to look our children in the eye and tell them we lived correctly, according to our culture.”

  We spoke about our obligations toward our culture versus our children and a better future for them. We could have talked about this for hours. But I had more pressing questions that had been puzzling me for months.

  I didn’t know whether I dared ask this one: Earlier in the day I’d been at a meeting at the subgovernor’s office where I’d met several elders from this village who’d presented themselves as power brokers, the movers and the shakers of the communities. Were these elders who they claimed to be?

  I had first gotten suspicious of such a group of elders in Jalalabad, when I would notice the same token elders representing different villages at different shura. Once I started paying attention, I noticed this everywhere I worked in Afghanistan. I started calling them “elders for hire.” In my job with HTS, it was more than just a joke for me; I wanted to know why the villagers were sending these men when traditionally they would want to build relationships with us directly.

  Red Beard laughed and confessed that these men were simply players. I had long suspected that the elders at all the PRTs were being presented as men of influence when they were only spies—and now my suspicion was confirmed.

  This was a breakthrough. I saw with my own eyes. The kind old man I was talking to was the real power broker of this village. He sat in the village center and addressed everyone’s problems. He made decisions while I was sitting there, deciding cases, networking, and making sure his people had what they needed from him: cultural knowledge and wisdom that had served as the law of the land for centuries. He was the heart of the village.

  I asked him why he was sending others to represent him, and before he could answer, a light went on in my head: Of course, I knew the reason! I remembered the countless accounts of “elders” being killed on their way to meetings with Afghan officials. They were being targeted by the insurgents for working with GIRoA and showing support to the foreign forces—the United States—by coming to these gatherings. This was another form of intimidation that the insurgents were using to subjugate the population of Afghanistan. There was no way Karzai would be able to provide protection for these participants, even as he was calling shura after shura to convey the participation of Pashtuns in his government. This was causing a lot of resentment toward his government because if he would stop calling these gatherings, the villagers wouldn’t have to send elders, and the elders wouldn’t be killed on their way there. Just as I had done earlier that day, Karzai had made a cultural blunder, revealing his lack of understanding of how his people lived and died.

  This was among the biggest reasons why the villagers were deeply unhappy with the U.S. and ANA presence in their village.

  “You have trusted me,” I said gratefully. “I have more respect for Pashtun culture than you might imagine. Now I am going to ask you for a favor. If you grant me this favor, I promise I will not violate any laws of Pashtunwali.” I was really pushing my luck, I knew, but what had happened with the men at the bazaar still stung me pretty bad, and I wanted to recapture a feeling of accomplishment.

  “Anything, looray,” he said, using the Pashtu endearment that means “daughter.”

  “I don’t mean any disrespect to you by mentioning your women in public, but I would love to talk to your daughters, and I would love to talk to your wife, and I would love to go inside the qalat and have some tea with them. I will leave my American agenda, as you call it, out here with you. I just want to see some real Pastun women.”

  He looked doubtful. I kept going, “My mother is a Pashtun woman, and I have not seen her for many months. I miss her so much. I just want to sit and talk with your women for a while.”

  He sighed. “I told you I would not refuse you anything, daughter. You may go inside, but you must leave your soldiers here. You have to go alone. You have to trust me when I say you will be protected. Here is your test of Pashtunwali! You know when I say you will be safe in my house, you can trust me.”

  It was completely out of the question for me to leave behind all the guys pulling security for me. Tom would not let me go inside unprotected. I might have felt safe knowing that Red Beard had given me his word, but Tom was a military commander and I was his “on loan” from his superior, and no way was he going to risk losing me to Pashtunwali. I told the elder that I would have to clear it with my commander.

  I took Tom aside and told him what had happened. “I know you’re freaking out, but this is a huge opportunity. You’ll be able to brag about the fact that under your watch one of your people was granted access to Zadran women. Imagine how happy Jason would be.”

  “Yes, but what if under my watch I lose a Pashtun woman on HTT? Imagine how upset Jason would be.”

  He refused to let me go in completely alone. I could take Mark, my teammate. He was twenty-five or twenty-six but looked like one of the many younger boys in the crowd. He was terrified. As we walked over to the old man Mark kept muttering, “They’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me.”

  “Relax,” I whispered. “I know these guys. You’re going to be fine.”

  I told Red Beard that I wanted to take him up on his hospitality to meet his women, but I couldn’t possibly go in without Mark, who was like my brother.

  Even though he was the decision maker of his house, in fact, the whole village, the old man still had to consult the other men, who told him that since he had already promised me anything, he should let me go inside.

  As he led Mark and me to his compound, he said, “Daughter, must you be armed?” I told him that these weapons were my responsibility, and he laughed.

  “I’m just a little worried,” he replied. “A Pashtun woman with American weapons. I hope you don’t give my women any ideas!”

  As soon as I stepped inside, I felt at home. This qalat could have been the qalat I spent a year in when I was little, or it could have been the qalat that I had spent a week in just a couple of years ea
rlier with my family in Ghazni. There were rooms all around the four walls, a courtyard in the center, colorful rugs spread out on the ground. There were a couple of women sitting there with several children, feeding them. They got up when they saw me, shocked, and probably scared that the Americans had invaded. Before they could panic, Red Beard, who was following a couple of steps behind me, stepped inside the compound and told them that everything was okay. I jumped in quickly, apologizing for scaring them, and talking to them in Pashtu so they could feel safer. Once I was inside, only a few women appeared at first. They wore the most beautiful clothes I’d ever seen, brightly colored tunics woven with gold and silver thread, gold bangles and earrings. Then more and more women arrived. The houses shared common walls, and it looked as if they were literally pouring out of the walls. Sisters, wives, cousins, aunties. Suddenly, I was very homesick.

  One by one they came to have a look at the American who spoke their language. They were shocked by everything: my Pashtu, my knowledge of Pashtunwali, my M-4, my nine-millimeter, my enormous boots and body armor. Even my bright orange hair, as they each took turns touching it.

  I could distinguish them by the way they dressed. The most modest girls, wearing simple clothes with little jewelry, were the single girls, waiting for their arranged marriages. The women in the brightest colors wearing the most opulent jewelry were the newlyweds. The women who wore more subdued colors, smaller earrings, and only a few rings had been married for a while. The woman in charge wore no jewelry at all but had a huge key ring on her belt, with keys to the sugar, the flour, the butter, and the money. She made a jingling noise when she walked. She looked like my own grandmother, just a few hundred miles away.

  I paid my respects to her first, and told her that one of my brothers was posted just outside the gate, and to please tell the ladies to stay clear of the gate.

  They brought me tea, but I couldn’t sit down to drink it—my body armor weighed fifty pounds and my boots were so high I couldn’t bend my knees, so I tried to just perch on the edge of a chair they brought out to the courtyard. The women were all sitting on the ground, still staring and talking to me all at once.

  If I felt bad for them being shut away from the world, they felt equally bad for me for being in the outside world in my unflattering fatigues, having to deal with the world day in, day out, with nothing but men for company. They worried about my mother—did she know I was wearing these clothes? And doing what I was doing? I said she knew, and she didn’t like any of it. They insisted that I should listen to my mother and just go home and be with her. They reminded me of the Muslim wisdom that heaven lies beneath a mother’s feet. I said it was too late, I was an American now, and as an American I expected my mother to just simply give me heaven to show me she loves me. They laughed so easily, just like the men outside. It amazed me to realize that in this environment that I found so suffocating, where I would struggle to last a day, they lived and laughed with such ease. I envied them this wonderful ability to find joy when their lives were so harsh and their futures so bleak.

  I asked them what they were thinking about, what their concerns were, and they surprised me again. Their issues were the same as those of their men outside: security, employment, education, health care, the well-being of their children, their fear of outsiders causing instability in their community. The difference was that they wanted these issues resolved for their men, so that their men could have jobs and live in a more stable and secure society, so their boys could go to school.

  I had thought these locked-away women would be completely out of touch, but apparently their husbands spoke to them (or around them, while the women brought them tea and served them dinner), about the world and what was going on in it. These women, who are clever and well informed, are a lost resource, and Afghanistan—at least as it operates now—is unwilling to benefit from their wisdom and insight. The Afghan men feel so threatened by what is going on in the country—the war, unemployment, insecurity—that they lash out against any efforts that might cause them to lose even more control. Since their women seem to be the only part of their lives they still exert control over, they would rather lock the women up inside the qalat than let them join the international development efforts and risk losing control over them.

  I was in there for about fifteen minutes. Tom forbade me to stay any longer. I said my good-byes to the ladies, knowing I would most likely not be able to repeat the experience, and savoring the chance to see real-life Pashtun women. They made me promise that I would go home and stop stressing out my mother. The loss of human potential in this house alone broke my heart. I wanted to do so much for the country, and I knew every one of these ladies would have been a perfect partner in my efforts. Leaving with a heavy heart, I walked outside, where both the Afghan and the American men were anxiously waiting.

  THIRTY-THREE

  One day in the fall of 2009, I was sitting in my office, finishing up a PowerPoint that I had to give to the brigade commander on the last mission I had just completed in Paktya. The day was sunny but awfully cold, which is probably why I was on my fifth cup of hot coffee. I was coming up on my deadline for the presentation and had missed lunch while trying to finish it. Audrey was outside the wire on another mission, and so no one was there to remind me that it was time to eat. I didn’t mind. I could always stop by Aziz’s for some warm bread and local gossip. As I was thinking about taking a short break, a soldier from the brigade TOC came looking for me. The new commander needed to see me in his office, right away, please.

  I sent the soldier back so I could have some alone time while walking from my office to the commander’s in the TOC building. In a combat zone, where you work and live in such close quarters, it’s hard to get time to yourself, surrounded as you are by obligations, thoughts of work, and other people bustling around. You learn to take every chance you can to step away from it all and savor the isolation, so whenever I would get summoned to the commander’s office I would take the longer route from our outside office to his inside the TOC. Unless it was an emergency—and I knew, on that occasion, that it wasn’t, or he would have used the phone in the office to reach me. The reflection of the sun off of the gravel was so bright that I had to squint as I walked, but I could still feel the chill in my bones. Appearances were so deceiving in Afghanistan—how was it that the bright sun was so cold? I was in one of my reflective moods, bordering on gloomy. I had talked to Mamai that morning, and as usual she had been crying, worried again that I might not leave Afghanistan alive, and I had to think that maybe she was right. I had been there for well over a year. Was it time for me to take a break, to live a normal life again? I had forgotten what my American life used to be like. When I first got to Afghanistan, I used to think about favorite places in Oregon, and talk about what I would do when I got back home. But lately I had begun to do nothing but talk about Afghanistan, the soldiers, the people; before one mission had even finished I’d be thinking about the next one. Afghanistan had completely consumed my life; I lived Afghanistan and I dreamt Afghanistan. In my dreams I was constantly running away from the insurgents, and for some reason, Najiba and Khalid were there in every one of my dreams, and I was trying to help them escape. U.S. soldiers were conspicuously absent in these dreams. I was all alone, trying to protect myself and my siblings.

  Lost in my thoughts, I walked into the commander’s office and saw that his political advisor, Kelly, was already there. Kelly was a tiny, petite woman, but God save the fool who thought that her size was indicative of what was inside her! She was beyond knowledgeable in the region, having worked and lived in Pakistan, Turkey, and several of the -stans, among other countries. She vehemently spoke her mind when she felt mistakes were being made, which was the trait that brought the two of us close together in an environment where emotions ran high but no one talked about feelings. Kelly had become something like the older sister I never had and had always tried to be to Najiba. We shared many late-night dinners in the courtyard outside the c
how hall, where—because of light restrictions—we had to use our flashlights to see what we were eating.

  The brigade commander, Mike, asked me if I would go to the governor’s compound with the PRT commander to deal with a situation that was highly political and could easily get out of hand. I had attended the battle update brief (BUB) that morning, so I knew he was talking about the civilian casualties from a night raid in a nearby village. The raid had not been conducted by Mike’s soldiers, but because he was the battle-space owner, he was responsible for every action by any soldier, so he wanted to be represented at the meeting. He asked me to be an observer at the meeting and report the villagers’ disposition back to him. There were so many things that were not in my job description for which I knew that I was the most qualified person, so there was no question of whether or not I’d go.

  We were leaving in half an hour, just enough time for me to tell my team leader that I had to go outside the wire and to prepare. I couldn’t find him but sent him a quick e-mail to tell him I would be back in a couple of hours, hopefully; then I met the PRT team, who had come by the brigade TOC to pick me up on the way. The drive to the governor’s compound was quick, and for once there were no incidents to slow us down. All the troublemakers were already at the governor’s compound, one of the soldiers said through the headset in my ear, which made communicating over the loud noises of the vehicle possible.

  The night raids and civilian deaths were just starting to be a political issue in early 2009. Already there was talk that Karzai was upset and wanted an investigation, but this was before he had made a public outcry about U.S. night raids. As I walked in with the rest of the U.S. soldiers, in my military uniform and armed, the villagers glared at us. There were chairs all around the room, and as we walked up to the section where some of the other U.S. elements were already sitting, I heard bits and pieces of conversations, all sounding very intense and upset. The meeting was called to session by one of the villagers getting up to say a quick prayer in Arabic. As soon as he sat down, all hell broke loose. The villagers wanted to know if the Americans were their friends, or invaders of Afghanistan. Not waiting for an answer, they charged ahead with accusations that the Americans had shamed the whole village by going over the walls, inside the compound, in the middle of the night, knowing that there were women, Pashtun women, asleep. Why didn’t they just kill the whole tribe? Everyone knew that there was no reason for any of the villagers to live after this kind of shame. I looked to see if the interpreters were doing their job well for the Americans, and what their reaction was. The American faces around me were expressionless, while the Afghan faces were incensed, indignant, full of rage. I tried to make my face blank, too, because in a gathering like this, you do not want to stand out in any way. Any emotions on my face would make me the center of attention and thus the target of all those impossible-to-answer questions.