by Fariba Nawa
The current burgeoning opium economy in Afghanistan is the product of these wars. In the 1980s, provinces under mujahideen control—Helmand, Kandahar, Nangarhar—grew more and more poppy. Opium production, which was 75 tons in 1932, the first year estimates are available, had jumped to 8,200 tons by 2007. Before the wars in the 1970s, about 85 percent of the country’s population lived in rural areas, and agriculture accounted for 68 percent of employment. But the continued conflict destroyed two-thirds of all villages and damaged the rural economy. The consequences were a 77 percent fall in livestock production, the destruction of a quarter of the irrigation system, and the abandonment of one-third of all farms. A third of the population fled Afghanistan, and 11 percent became internally displaced. By 1988 there had been a 45 percent decrease in food production since the 1979 Soviet invasion.
In September 1982, after the school bombing, my family flees across the desert to Iran, a donkey bearing the weight of our belongings—clothes, shoes, toiletries, and a carpet. We reach Iran safely, but after a month we must leave. Afghans cannot obtain visas to the United States or Europe from Iran. The 1979 Iranian Revolution has hindered Iran’s relationship with the United States and Europe. Afghans who stay in Iran end up becoming laborers and are treated as second-class citizens: they are not allowed to own homes or businesses, get a higher education, or become citizens. Afghan refugees who want to go to a developed nation head for Pakistan, the transition country.
In Pakistan, my father exchanges his slacks and collared shirt for the traditional Pakistani cotton tunic and loose pants; my mother and Faiza wear the black Iranian chador; and I wear a long dress with white pants and a large scarf. My mom sews some of her collection of gold around the edge of my scarf. The rest of our fortune—$3,500 in cash, a reference letter from an American Peace Corps serviceman who worked with my father, and my mother’s remaining gold—are in a leather wallet wrapped around my mother’s neck and tucked under her dress. We take Iranian public buses to Zahedan, at the border, then ride on various private Pakistani buses that smuggle Afghans across the southern tip of the Iranian-Pakistani border. At one point the Pakistani bus we are on stops and uniformed tribal Pakistani soldiers board it with a heavyset woman. The woman searches the females, including me, and finds the gold around my light green scarf. She takes off my scarf. I feel naked and want to cry, but I hold back and gain strength by looking at my father. He smiles at me. The woman also takes my mom’s wallet. My father steps outside the bus with the police and settles on a bribe: five dollars to get back all our belongings.
A few hours later we reach safety in Quetta, Pakistan, and a few days later, we are in Pakistan’s verdant capital, Islamabad. We spend eighteen months in Islamabad awaiting a visa to the United States or Germany, where my brother fled after his college graduation. We are now officially refugees, part of the mass exodus of Afghan technocrats and intellectuals. But we, the well-to-do diaspora, do not live in camps as the poor do. We rent big, shady houses and enroll in the mujahideen-run schools. Afghans organize daily demonstrations against the Soviets on the streets of Pakistani cities. My mother and I go out shopping one day and see hundreds of demonstrators shouting, “Allahu Akbar [God is great]!” and “Marg bar Rus [Death to the Russians]!” It’s in Pakistan where the mujahideen become our heroes. They are going to save us and Afghanistan. I tug on my mom’s skirt to push her to join the demonstration and revel in the power of crowds—the solidarity of feeling as one, chanting and marching all together. We forget that the mujahideen bomb our schools and kill our children as collateral damage just like the Soviets. Distance allows us to form an idealized version of the truth. The memories powered by our nostalgia will become reality.
Afghans in Pakistan seek political asylum through a U.S.-funded refugee office established in Islamabad in 1980 to serve the mass of Afghan refugees who want to flee to the United States. If Afghans want to apply for asylum in other developed countries, they go to those countries’ respective embassies. Most countries they apply to require some form of evidence to grant asylum, but obtaining a visa to the United States, where American churches and nonprofit groups sponsor refugees, is easy for Afghans. Some Iranians and Pakistanis even forge Afghan identities to seek entry to the United States. We apply to both the United States and Germany, but my father’s reference letter from the Peace Corps serviceman ensures us a visa to the United States faster than one to Germany. From the plane, I wave good-bye in the direction of Afghanistan, unaware of the changes that lie ahead.
The relatives we leave behind endure seven more years of the Soviet invasion and then a civil war among the mujahideen. One of my mother’s brothers, Uncle Rostam, was conscripted as a soldier in the Afghan military. He managed to work at a base near home, until he, too, fled with his wife and children in 1988.
From his new home in Germany now, Uncle Rostam, fifty-one, tells me about life in Herat after my family escaped:
“The city deteriorated every year as the war ensued. There was no security. We had no fun, no real work or education. Our wives were teachers, and we all had government jobs and survived on the meager government salary, but the teachers could not teach fairly because a Khalqi student would force them to give a good grade or risk death. We could not leave our homes past the eight PM curfew. The younger women who had never worn burqas began to wear them out of fear. We would come home to watch the one channel run by the government on TV when there was electricity.”
The thunder of cluster bombs, rockets, and grenades got louder and closer. Some of the soldiers in my uncle’s unit were working for both the government and the rebels. By day they would guard the city as soldiers, but at night they’d steal ammunition and weapons for the mujahideen. The Soviets were losing the war, and the Afghan military was deserting by the thousands. “We couldn’t kill our own people,” my uncle explained.
Uncle Rostam, an unassuming, lanky man with a wide smile, was deployed to battle a few times. “There were hundreds of us armed with tanks, helicopters, and guns marching toward the rebels, but they were usually the winners, because they got to hide and ambush in small packs of a dozen. Toward the end of the war the Soviets would bribe the mujahids to surrender and join the army. They were called taslimis [surrenderers], and this began the disease of warlordism in the country. These illiterate taslimis were criminals. They had been in the mountains fighting, and the government let them keep their arms and gave them more power. They trafficked drugs, stole, extorted money, and raped women.”
One of them came to a tailor friend of Uncle Rostam’s and ordered him to sew seven outfits for his men in two days. He didn’t give him money, even for the fabric.
“It’s impossible for us to finish this in so little time,” the tailor told him.
“Well, then I’ll have to finish a round of these on your shop and your family,” the taslimi threatened, showing the tailor the necklace of bullets wrapped around his shoulder. “Would you like that?”
The tailor called all his employees and made sure the outfits were done in time.
Uncle Rostam says drug trafficking became more common during the war, but there was little heroin then. It was mostly opium being transported to Iran. Since the mujahideen controlled most of the borders, they also controlled the trafficking, taking cuts from any transactions they could track. Addicts within Afghanistan were few and far between, and poppy planting was unknown in Herat. The drugs came from the south, the east, and from Pakistan, he says.
Mr. Jawan, our neighbor in Herat, was a man with a big heart and a head covered in coarse, shiny hair. He liked to shop at the stores that did not have many customers, to help the struggling shopkeepers. The people who worked for him were the poorest and neediest. His driver, Kako, was night blind, but Mr. Jawan hired him because no one else would. Mr. Jawan’s second wife, Sitara, complained to him about the driver’s limitations. “Why can’t you hire a driver who can drive day and night?”
“Try to go to the places you want during the day
, because he has kids and needs a job, and nobody else will hire him,” Mr. Jawan replied.
Mr. Jawan was not related to us, but since they lived next door, his family was like family to us. My memories of him in Herat revolve around food. When his family invited us to his ten-bedroom house for a meal, the housekeeper laid out a sofra, a tablecloth, on the floor and Mr. Jawan’s four children gathered around, mouths watering, hands washed. The children sat cross-legged, the women bent their knees and tucked their feet under, and Mr. Jawan leaned on a pillow, half of his body plopped on the floor. He was not fond of exercise or diet food. Servants filled the sofra with large china platters wafting the aromas of freshly cooked delicacies: qabuli palau (rice mixed with carrots, raisins, and mutton), borani banjan (fried eggplant with yogurt and tomatoes), and bolani (fried stuffed potato and leek pancakes).
“Don’t take too long digging in, because I’m going to eat all of this,” he used to warn my father.
Mr. Jawan liked the servants to sit next to him, eat, and finish the food on their plates. He also insisted that women join in with the men in conversation. The telephone had to be near him at all times. It allowed him to communicate with relatives and colleagues without getting up, which he preferred. He liked to tell stories, and when he retired from opium smuggling and moved to Italy in 1992, many of those stories were about his escapades in the drug trade.
In the summer of 2005, I visit Mr. Jawan in the one-bedroom apartment he shares with Sitara in Rome. His hair has turned white, and he complains of fatigue and a pain in his left arm. He is in his eighties. He sits up on a twin brass bed as he holds his cup of boiling black tea in his right hand and talks.
“It was a business like any other. I made money, but I made sure anyone who needed my money got it as well. Most people at that time used opium to treat the pain they had from illnesses, because they didn’t have access to other medicines. So I helped people in that way.
“I almost got caught during the Soviet invasion, but God was with me because I escaped . . . with some help from contacts in law enforcement,” he chuckles, his light brown eyes sparkling.
Friends, relatives, and Mr. Jawan himself recall his adventures as endearing comic mishaps, not tragic tales of death and destruction. But when the stories are unraveled, beyond the humor lie corruption, violence, and the various misfortunes of drug smuggling. The main difference is the level of violence then and now. Mr. Jawan had an automatic rifle, but he never shot people when he transported drugs. The smugglers I encounter today have shot their machine guns and rockets at authorities and rival smugglers numerous times.
Mr. Jawan was a kerakash, a middleman, in the drug trade. Rich merchants paid him a few hundred dollars to transport sealed boxes of drugs to Iran, but he rarely carried them across the border himself. He had a network of couriers he paid to traffic. He would transfer the drugs in a Jeep from Herat city to his village, Tirpul, on the border. In the village, the men had dug several deep ditches to store the contraband, which they covered with wooden boards. Several armed guards patrolled on rooftops to protect the hidden drugs.
The couriers would take small amounts of drugs to Iran. As in the United States, Iran punished smugglers according to the number of kilos seized. Iranian merchants paid Mr. Jawan to smuggle gold coins and gold bricks to China. If they transported the gold legally through Afghanistan, they had to pay high tariffs.
Even before the 1978 coup, battles and skirmishes killed smugglers in the desert; one of Mr. Jawan’s brothers was killed in a tribal dispute over drugs. Often the instigating clan had to give a daughter in marriage to settle the argument. Two of Mr. Jawan’s attractive sisters were bartered as opium brides.
My late maternal grandfather, Sayed Akbar Hossaini, was the district governor of Ghoryan in 1957 when he received reports that Mr. Jawan was about to transport large quantities of opium to the border. “Even a migrating bird traveled with smuggled goods in Ghoryan,” my grandfather used to say. But like today, the district governor did not have the manpower or the weapons to fight the smugglers. He took five of his police officers to block the road that Mr. Jawan was due to use on his way to Tirpul. The officers with my grandfather, whose guns had no ammunition, nervously waited for Mr. Jawan, terrified he would shoot them.
But when Mr. Jawan saw my grandfather and the police, he stopped driving, raised his arms, and exited his Jeep. He greeted the authorities with respect.
“Governor, sir, here is my gun, my Jeep, and my goods hidden in the back of the Jeep,” he told my grandfather. “Please take them. I can take your old car to go to my village, if you allow me, and we can forget this ever happened.”
My grandfather’s hands shook as he took Mr. Jawan’s gun. He could not believe that Mr. Jawan was being so accommodating.
“Khair bini [bless you],” he said to the smuggler. Haji Baba agreed to let Mr. Jawan take his car and carry on to Tirpul. Then he proudly brought Mr. Jawan’s surrendered items to his boss, the provincial governor of Herat, who told my grandfather that Mr. Jawan must come see him.
“I want to convince him to stop drug smuggling,” he told Haji Baba.
My grandfather relayed the message to Mr. Jawan, who promptly obeyed. He conveyed his apologies and kissed the Herat governor’s hands. He said in front of the governor’s staff that he would cease smuggling. Later the truth came out—some of the drugs he’d been carrying that day belonged to the provincial governor.
“It was how things were done,” Mr. Jawan tells me. “The governor could not make that kind of money as a government official, but he needed to show that he had a luxurious life as a person of power. He did what was necessary.”
Mr. Jawan became our neighbor in the 1950s, shortly after this incident, when he married a respected city girl, Sitara, in Herat. His first wife, Narinji, was his first cousin, and she could not bear children. He married a second time to have children, especially a son. Sitara bore three sons and a daughter. Traditionally Afghans prefer to marry first cousins, and if such a marriage proves problematic, a man can take on another wife if he has the means. Some interpretations of Islam allow men to marry up to four wives, if they can treat them equally.
After the Soviet invasion, Mr. Jawan’s smuggling business became riskier. The fighting on the borders and in the deserts kept him away from his village. In his Herat city home, he built an underground storage facility for drugs and arms. One day, outside his house, he and another smuggler fought, and the smuggler reported Mr. Jawan to the police.
“The godless liar accused me of shortchanging him,” Mr. Jawan says, smirking and taking a sip of his cooled tea. “I slapped him. He took his revenge, but he didn’t succeed.”
When the police showed up at his home, Mr. Jawan climbed the wall in his yard and crawled through a hole to his next-door neighbors’ house, the Faruqis. He fell on his round belly and injured it. The neighbors helped him hide behind a stack of folded mats and blankets in one of their rooms. The police raided his house and found the drugs. His wife Sitara and daughter, Nadia, sat huddled in their chadors inside the house.
“Where is your husband?” one of the officers asked Sitara.
“He’s out of town,” she answered with a confident, straight face.
Then one of Mr. Jawan’s friends, who worked in the police station, appeared and tried to defuse the situation.
“He’s gone, and these women are innocent. We should get out of here,” he told the lead officer.
When the police left, Mr. Jawan’s wife and daughter lifted their chadors to reveal the guns and ammunition Mr. Jawan had been storing to give to the mujahideen. His clan had become mujahideen members, and Mr. Jawan had found a side business smuggling arms. If the police had found the weapons on the women, it’s likely they would’ve killed the entire family. The Communist government allowed drug smugglers to go free, but not mujahideen supporters.
The neighbors helped dress Mr. Jawan in a turban and a long coat, which he had to struggle to fit into, and a pair of ey
eglasses. They put him in a taxi, and he left town for more than a month. He continued to smuggle after this incident, but on a much smaller scale. “It wasn’t worth the money anymore,” he tells me. “I had children who needed me. But the business did not have a good end, so I left it and my homeland. Now I just live with my memories.”
By the end of the war in 1989, the Afghan Army had shrunk from ninety thousand men to thirty thousand. The Soviets carpet-bombed villages, killing civilians, and mined the countryside with toy mines, which have left Afghanistan with thousands of maimed men, women, and children. A change of guard in Kabul put Mohammed Najibullah, a former secret police chief, in charge of the country in 1987. He established a nationalist party and invited debate and participation in the government. Some Kabulis remember his time as the most peaceful and prosperous of the Soviet invasion. In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, the new charismatic leader interested in openness and change, wanted the Soviets to leave Afghanistan. The Stinger missiles Washington was sending had demoralized the Red Army and tipped the war greatly against the Soviets. Withdrawal was long overdue.