Opium Nation

by Fariba Nawa

  “The usual, khwarak [sister],” he says. “We’re used to this. I have to pay God knows how much to replace that glass.”

  I have been feeling guilty for our decision to leave the country, not knowing when we would return again. But this latest bomb relieves the guilt. It was the bomb at my school that convinced my parents to escape from Afghanistan in 1982. My father had nothing to gain in the West but his children’s safety. In Kabul, I have a meaningful career, a house with a garden, a housekeeper and cook, a driver, and the warmth of a culture that I longed to return to for two decades. But it is not safe, and soon I’ll have a child to care for. The sight of blood and shattered windows is no longer a thrill for me. My fascination with war is waning as I get closer to motherhood. I do not want the children I plan to bear desensitized to violence like the man in the bakery. The end of my journey in Afghanistan parallels my parents’, but how dare I make the comparison?

  I contrast my parents’ loss in leaving Afghanistan with mine. They had to give up their families, jobs, status, homes, and language—an entire lifetime—to be transplanted to safety and convenience, an oasis of comfort that’s slowly killing them with depression and loneliness. Their grandchildren speak English and get bored when they visit them because the TV programs are in Farsi and there are no computers or video games to play. How dare I compare my situation to theirs? They cannot return because the Afghanistan they left vanished with them.

  I can simply resume my suburban life in the United States. I can take my child to Lake Elizabeth in Fremont to play with the ducks and swing in the playground. I can watch a movie in the theater, appreciate twenty-four-hour electricity and sanitized water, be in public with no head scarf and a sleeveless blouse, and enjoy the freedoms I forsook to be back in my homeland. I can return to my parents, lay my head on my father’s shoulder, and eat my mother’s cooking. I can help them feel less lonely.

  The next day, when I get on the plane from Kabul, I fully intend to return with my daughter and husband and can only hope that, by then, the mines will be cleared, health care will be reliable, suicide bombers will be gone, and opium will no longer be the staple crop of the economy. I will return to visit, stay connected, and preserve my rich and diverse heritage. Afghanistan is a part of me, and I no longer fear losing it. I can let go of the nostalgia, the bittersweetness of a gratifying childhood ruptured by war, and supplant it with the memories of the seven years I have spent here in my adulthood. These five years have clarified the country, made it real for me. My evolving relationship with Afghanistan has allowed me to reconcile my two cultures and strengthen my Afghan identity. I no longer need to prove that I’m an Afghan to myself, to anyone.

  Epilogue

  2010

  Naeem is reading Mullah Nasruddin, a comical folk tale read in Afghanistan and Iran, to our two-year-old daughter, Bonoo, as she sits on his lap twirling her brunette curls. Her majestic black eyes are fixed on the pages. “Asp,” she says excitedly, pointing to the horse Mullah’s wrestling with in the book. I have just finished loading the dishwasher. The living room floor is littered with toys in our compact two-bedroom town house in Fremont, the hamper is overflowing with laundry, and the leftovers from the dinner I cooked have to be stored in the refrigerator. I have joined the tired working mothers of America who don’t have maids, drivers, or nannies. Leaving the kitchen, I watch my husband reading to my daughter and smile with gratitude.

  We live five minutes from my parents, ten minutes from my sister, and fifteen minutes from my brother. It’s comforting to be settled near my family after more than a decade of traveling. My parents are thrilled to have a new grandchild, the youngest of six, and they take great joy in playing with her in their seventh-floor apartment overlooking the rolling green hills of Fremont. My father is eighty and suffers from a long list of ailments. After a mild stroke, he’s barely able to speak, but he still has the ability to do what he loves: read. I replenish his Farsi book collection from the Fremont library, which offers materials in several foreign languages. My mother continues to be a social butterfly and is taking an English class, again, at the age of seventy-four. Their most time-consuming recreation is still Afghan satellite TV, whose programs include dubbed Indian soap operas and dozens of new Afghan music videos.

  On weekends someone in our Herati circle throws a dinner party and we all get together to eat sumptuous Afghan food and talk. The men and women segregate themselves. The men like to talk politics, and the women assemble in the kitchen, where the conversation centers on their children, cooking, and shopping. I usually don’t fit in, but I’m too busy running after my toddler to notice who is doing what.

  Naeem and I often miss our life in Afghanistan, and we stay in touch with his family in Herat and my friends in Kabul. I’m at times restless to return to the field and work, but then I look at Bonoo and forget those desires. “One day we’ll take you back to Afghanistan,” I tell her. “Can you say ‘Afghanistan’?”

  She stumbles on the first two syllables, hugs me, and asks for milk. After I put her to sleep for the night, I check the news online. Afghanistan is often in the headlines. President Obama has sent twenty-one thousand more troops there, and the U.S. Marines have teamed up with the Afghan National Army to attack the last Taliban stronghold, Marjah district, in Helmand province, the place I didn’t dare travel to when I went to look for Darya. Marjah’s main source of income is raw opium. It has the largest distribution market in Helmand and provides safe haven for hundreds of heroin laboratories. The Taliban receive a tax and kickbacks for protecting trafficking routes and poppy farms. When the military operation began there, the Taliban used women and children as human shields inside civilian homes. Fifteen civilians were killed.

  I wonder if Darya is in Marjah. Perhaps I can still find her.

  After reading the news about Marjah, I track down Saber, who is still living in Ghoryan with his entire family. It’s a delight to hear his tender voice.

  “I have two kids and another one on the way. My mother has stomach problems and she went blind, and one of my brothers became a heroin dealer in Iran, but he has promised to stop because my father threatened to disown him. I have no job—my father supports us—but I’m happy that I have these kids,” he says quickly, not wanting to hike up my phone bill. “My sister Tina is married to a man who keeps her on a leash, but she’s happy with the one daughter she has now.”

  Saber tells me that Ghoryan town center has developed, the roads are paved, twenty-four-hour power and running water are available, and the farmers who planted poppy have switched to saffron in the last couple of years. Yet unemployment has risen because villagers in the desert have moved to the center of the district. The only jobs that remain are in drug trafficking, which has doubled in the last seven years, and drug lords such as Haji Sardar have become richer with government backing. They launder their money through car businesses. “It’s all about crystal heroin now,” Saber says. “Opium is for small-timers.”

  When I ask about Darya, he says her mother is in Ghoryan and she might know her daughter’s whereabouts. An hour later, he calls me with Basira’s mobile number. My heart is pounding when I dial it. Basira’s life must have improved financially for her to have a cell phone. My worst fear is that Darya has self-immolated like so many girls in Afghanistan.

  Basira answers with unusual warmth. She tells me that her son Aman, who had gone with his sister, returned safely from Helmand, and that Darya is alive and well. She does live in Marjah. “Every time I hear Helmand in the news, I worry about my baby,” Basira tells me. “But her life is there now.” She tells me that her oldest daughter, Saboora, is married to a man close to her age, in Ghoryan. The smuggler her father had sold her to never came to marry her.

  I ask Basira so many questions that she can’t keep up. Darya’s eighteen or nineteen now and has a son who’s a year old. New brides generally get pregnant as soon as they marry, but Darya did not get her period until two years ago. Her husband consummated the
ir relationship despite her prepubescence.

  Basira stayed with Darya in Marjah to take care of her after she had her son. Darya has calmed down now and no longer fights back. Her biggest problem is with her hambaq, her husband’s other wife, who shares the same yard but lives in different rooms. “When his two wives fight, he beats both of them,” Basira says. “But he’s a good Muslim. He brings her to visit me every six or seven months.” When they visit, they stay for about two months, during which time Darya buys herself makeup and clothes in Ghoryan, which is nearly a city compared with Marjah. “My heart doesn’t want me to go back there,” Darya has told her mother. “They are all strangers to me.”

  Basira says Darya’s life is poor but tolerable. Marjah has no power or running water, mobile phones, or television signals. Darya and her husband and his other wife live off the land, and Darya spends her time doing housework. She has learned to speak fluent Pashto and translates for her mother. Women do not go outside in Marjah unless they need to go to the doctor. Darya wears a chador when she visits the doctor and is accompanied there by her husband. According to Basira, she was cold toward her husband until she had her son. Now that Haji Tor is the father of her child, Darya seems to have some affection for him.

  “He has sons her age. Why didn’t he marry one of them to her?” I ask Basira.

  “It was written in his and her forehead that they would marry each other. It was their destiny.”

  I’m angry about her response but I listen, relieved and horrified at the same time. Darya’s life doesn’t seem any different from that of the women I met in Sangin, Helmand. She seems to have learned to cope with the lack of freedom and the distance from her family. Afghan women’s threshold for suffering seems higher than any Western woman can imagine. The calm, quiet martyr is a good woman in many Afghan eyes. Basira says her daughter is a “good” girl now that she has learned to obey. It’s this ability to adapt that keeps Afghan women confined. But it’s also how they survive.

  I may never find out how Darya learned to cope, how she calmed the rebel in her. But perhaps I will one day see her again and she can share her story. I want to believe that the free-spirited Darya I met still has her defiant zeal, even if it’s hidden; that she can defend herself and needs no savior; that she can be herself when she visits her mother; that she can go out shopping, laugh out loud, and scream at the top of her lungs.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  2 A former chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration: Asa Hutchinson, speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., April 2, 2002, viewed online at www.justice.gov/dea/speeches/s040202.html.

  ONE: HOME AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS

  9 The government first jailed him: Author’s interview with Fazul Haq Nawa.

  10 The Authorities of Herat: title translated by the author.

  11 The Mongol leader killed thousands: Lonely Planet, viewed online at www.lonelyplanet.com/afghanistan/herat-and-northwestern-afghanistan/herat/history.

  12 The United States gave weapons: Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, 29; and Adam Stahl, “Al-Qa’ida’s American Connection,” Global Politics, May 16, 2008, viewed online at www.global-politics.co.uk/issue6/Stahl/.

  12 The Afghan Communist government: Edward Girardet, “In the Marjah Offensive of the Afghanistan War, a Reporter Hears Echoes of the Soviet War,” Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 2010.

  18 The four thousand tons of opium produced: John Pomfret, “Drug Trade Resurgent in Afghanistan,” Washington Post, October 23, 2001, viewed online at www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36532-2001Oct22?language=printer.

  18 Until the 2000 opium ban: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, The Role of Women in Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan, June 2000.

  19 “Call of Love”: Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, in Rumi and Sufism, trans. Simone Fattal, Sausalito, Calif.: Post-Apollo Press, 1977, 1987, 104.

  TWO: FOUR DECADES OF UNREST

  31 The Durand Line was drawn: Ralph H. Magnus and Eden Naby, Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx and Mujahid, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998, 36.

  32 the United States spent more than $3 billion: Political Freedom Research Institute, country profile Web site, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, viewed online at www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/dpe/modern_conflicts/Afghanistan.pdf.

  32 Ronald Reagan’s government: Amir Zada Asad and Robert Harris, The Politics and Economics of Drug Production on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Border, Burlington, UK: Ashgate, 2003.

  32 “The United States was not waging”: Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, 29, 33.

  32 The king’s motives were twofold: Magnus and Naby, Afghanistan, 36, 37.

  33 In 1958, King Mohammed Zahir: Martin Booth, Opium: A History, New York: St. Martins Press, 1996, 252.

  33 Afghanistan produced one hundred: Interview with Matthew DuPee, Naval Postgraduate School.

  33 Seeds were loaned: Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009, 34.

  34 American agricultural aid projects: Adam Curtis, “The Lost History of Helmand,” The Medium and the Message (blog), BBC, October 2009, viewed online at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/10/kabul_city_number_one_part_3.html.

  34 Mullah Nasim forced farmers: Peters, Seeds of Terror, 34.

  34 supplies fifteen million addicts: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium, New York: United Nations Publications, 2009, 1, viewed online at www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Afghanistan/Executive_Summary_english.pdf.

  35 which sells for $3,000: Interview with U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Kabul, 2005.

  38 Pakistan returned Hekmatyar and Massoud: Paul Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gould, and Sima Wali, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009, 126, 127.

  38 no tolerance for religious militancy: Magnus and Naby, Afghanistan, 46.

  39 buried them alive: Interviews with families of Afghans who disappeared during the Communist regime, Kabul, 2007.

  39 guided by the Soviet KGB: Interview with Assadullah Sarwari, head of the Afghan secret service in 1978 and 1979, Kabul, 2007.

  40 first serious uprising: Interviews with eyewitnesses in Herat present during the 1979 uprising, Fremont, California, 2008.

  40 Moscow refused: Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan, New York: HarperCollins, 2009, 33.

  41 five thousand people died: Ibid., 31.

  41 smothered to death with a pillow: Ibid., 48

  42 fund heroin laboratories: Asad and Harris, The Politics and Economics of Drug Production, 53.

  42 the mujahideen found ways to hook: Ibid., 53, 54

  43 fake Russian newspaper articles: Ibid., 53

  43 CIA executed the plan: Ibid.

  43 accounted for 68 percent of employment: Deepak Lal, “Endangering the War on Terror with the War on Drugs,” World Economics, July–September 2008, 1–29, viewed online at www.econ.ucla.edu/Lal/Lal_World_Economics_vol_9_03_08.pdf.

  43 there had been a 45 percent decrease: Ibid.

  43 treated as second-class citizens: Interviews with Afghan refugee returnees from Iran, Herat, 2003.

  52 had shrunk from ninety thousand: Feifer, The Great Gamble, 105.

  52 In 1989, with 15,000 Soviet soldiers: Lawrence M. Paul, “Afghanistan: How We Got There,” New York Times, February 8, 2010, viewed online at teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/features/index.asp?article=f020810_afghan.

  53 casualties rose to sixty thousand: Danish Karokhel, “Mujahedin Victory Event Falls Flat,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, May 4, 2003, viewed online at www.eariana.com/ariana/eariana.nsf/allDocsArticles/D499F506DA74819687
256D1C0046bcC5?OpenDocument.

  THREE: A STRUGGLE FOR COHERENCY

  56 allegedly masterminded: Tony Perry, “Afghan Commander Massoud, Killed on Eve of 9/11 Attacks, is a National Hero,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2010, viewed online at articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/22/world/la-fg-afghanistan-massoud-20100922.

  57 dictate future wars: Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 26.

  57 “clash of ignorance”: Edward W. Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation, October 22, 2001, viewed online at www.thenation.com/article/clash-ignorance.

  67 The extent of Nadeem’s understatement: Tom Coghlan, “Mass Grave Plundered at Site of Taleban Prisoners’ Massacre,” Sunday Times, December 24, 2008. Viewed online at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5391550.ece.

  68 thousands in the diaspora: Interviews with Afghans repatriating from the West, Kabul, 2003.

  FOUR: MY FATHER’S VOYAGE

  70 “Several other travelers and I boarded”: Fazul Haq Nawa, “The Continuation of Memories,” trans. Fariba Nawa, Ansari Literary Association Publication, September 1997.

  78 coercion and bribery: Agence France Presse, “Afghan Warlords Hindering Loya Jirga Process: HRW,” June 13, 2002, viewed online at www.rawa.org/warlord4.htm.

  78 “Voting for the Loya Jirga”: Lakhdar Brahimi, interviewed on ABC News, June 12, 2002.

  79 “The former king is not a candidate”: Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls, “America’s Viceroy,” ZNet, May 20, 2009, viewed online at www.zcommunications.org/americas-viceroy-by-sonali-kolhatkar.

  79 “we delegates were denied”: Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi, “The Warlords Win in Kabul,” New York Times, June 21, 2002, viewed online at www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/opinion/21NIAZ.html.

  84 It was a polarized society: Interviews with several Ghoryan natives who are scholars, Herat, 2004.