by Suzy Hansen
Afghans were also terribly poor, and far away from the dynamism of the city center, some lived a bleached existence, relying entirely on the one family member who managed to land a job with the “dog washers,” the Afghans who returned from abroad, or with the “Michaels,” as foreigners were sometimes called. One young man who worked for Global, the security company that ran the Kabul airport, supported eight families on seventy dollars a day, and that was a fortune. The Afghan elite lived in enormous “poppy palaces,” the Central Asian disco version of a McMansion, homes so unbearably ugly and ostentatious, they seemed to be engaged in satire. In some sections, the city felt warm and pleasant. Huge acacia trees canopied the Kabul streets, fat roses grew tall as fences, women wore outfits other than the cinematic blue burka. Kabul’s buildings were low-slung like in New Orleans, many of the streets hummed with urban normalcy: Small-time entrepreneurs taught their sons the family trade—ice cream churning, kebab spinning, deli owning. Small girls in black pantsuits and white head scarves carried parasols and walked to school in cheerful groups. Indian music consumed the traffic. Shakira’s World Cup theme song was popular. The rest of the country, I was told to remember, was nothing like Kabul.
The main Western neighborhood was called Wazir Akbar Khan, once Kabul’s wealthiest enclave. As in many Muslim cities, walls ringed the yards of the homes, so everywhere there were gates. Where there were a lot of foreigners, there were also blast walls: big, flat upright slabs of concrete, Hesco crates filled with sandbags and topped with barbed wire. A local could tell you what’s beyond all those walls: “To the right is Special Forces, ahead of you is the American embassy, to the left is the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF], then the Spanish embassy and the Italian embassy, and beyond that the CIA and Camp Eggers, and then the British embassy, the Pakistani embassy, a Karzai relative’s house, the Canadians.” Walls obscured everything, so the streets felt like hallways—like a massive, mazelike skateboarding ramp, or a mental institution. You saw only the walls and the checkpoints and the sky. I had wondered whether Kabul would feel like an occupation, but it felt as though, rather than occupying the city of Kabul, the international community was occupying itself.
An Afghan woman would eventually warn me of the differences between Afghans and Americans. Often, she explained, Afghans politely lied to their Western patrons about their true opinions, refraining from leveling criticism out of courtesy. Americans took everything at face value. Communication broke down for cultural reasons. I was told this, yet for my first days in Kabul, part of me still believed one thing the Afghans said—that despite our many failings, they hoped the West wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t help it; they all said the same thing.
* * *
I WENT TO the Gandamack Lodge to meet its owner, Hassina Syed, one Thursday night in June. Since the Muslim day of rest falls on Friday, Westerners let off steam on Thursday nights, and that evening they filled up nearly every seat in the Gandamack’s resplendent garden. The lodge, a two-story house with a wraparound porch, was hidden behind two gates and several guards with machine guns. Syed, only thirty years old and full of energy, wore a beautiful peach pantsuit and patterned scarf around her neck, which fluttered behind her as she made her rounds. Lanterns on tables lit up the smiling faces of the customers, their pale skin hanging in the night like many moons.
The daughter of a mujahideen father and an illiterate mother, Syed had founded a women’s organization and was experimenting with new farming technologies. She had a lot to say about what was happening in Kabul. To her, Afghanistan—its apples rotting on the ground, its factories rusting, and its lapis lazuli mines inactive—was a kingdom of untapped wealth that hadn’t become much improved with the influx of aid projects. If Afghans in the countryside complained about bombs, Afghans in Kabul complained about USAID.
General Stanley McChrystal’s surge (and Obama’s) had meant billions of more dollars for USAID, which built schools, “implemented farming initiatives,” and set up weaving looms for poor women, generally serving as the kinder face of America in the world. But USAID, too, was in a state of decline. In the past, USAID had undertaken ambitious and expensive modernization projects in Afghanistan. In the 1960s, “Little America” in Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province was a manufactured utopia with irrigation projects and schools; Afghans and Americans lived together and never, goes the story, locked their doors. Little America grew out of America’s faith in modernization theory. But many of Little America’s programs failed, and the community was finally destroyed by Afghanistan’s many wars.
In the post-9/11 years, the United States spent $67 billion on civilian-aid programs in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Afghans like Syed knew that much of this money went to America’s own companies. After September 11, USAID was flooded with funds, but not with employees; the staff couldn’t manage such large sums. Aid organizations that have too much money rushed to spend it, and the easiest way to do that was to quickly give the projects to someone else. So if USAID officials decided to build a medical clinic, instead of erecting it themselves, they hired Louis Berger Group to do so. Louis Berger Group was then free to hire a whole slew of private subcontractors, and ultimate accountability vanished into the recursive transactions. When the windows in the clinic didn’t close in winter, was it the responsibility of USAID or of some corporation they outsourced to?
The Afghans had trouble winning these bids entirely. “The contracts always say you have to have ‘past performance’—who in Afghanistan has that?” Syed said. “Afghan women don’t have ‘past performance.’ How can we compete with retirees from the U.S. Army? Please don’t invite foreigners to compete with ordinary Afghans. The money should stay like concrete, in Afghanistan.” She ground her spoon into her bowl. “The soldiers and USAID people don’t bring their families here. They will leave. We need sustainable projects.”
Syed told me that she had been invited to ISAF to listen to a talk about a much-vaunted USAID program that encouraged the foreign occupying forces to buy local Afghan products. After the presentation, Syed stood up and inquired why the three types of bottled water being consumed at the conference were from Spain, Pakistan, and Dubai.
“We have water!” she said to me. “We have bottled water. Why weren’t they buying our Afghan water?”
Syed got up and socialized with her guests. I recognized a stocky British woman curled up in the corner, smoking, who earlier that week I had seen at the popular lunch spot the Flower Street Café. While discussing some internal politics, I assumed, at the British embassy, she had said, “Oh, no, but you can’t say that! Whatever you say—we’re not leaving. This is not Basra!” So many foreigners in Kabul had worked in Iraq, too. They always hastened to declare Baghdad far worse than Kabul. This woman laughed loudly, but I detected a gentle panic trailing in the wake of these Western conversations. There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.” You could see that alarm in the USAID workers’ frantic smiles as they showed off the latest farm project.
When I went to the bathroom, I saw a Brit gripping the end of an artificial leg as if playing with it. “See, I told you!” he said, laughing to his friend and pointing. I followed his finger’s direction until I saw an elderly man selling Afghan souvenirs in the foyer: lapis lazuli bowls, jangly chain belts, silver jewelry. He rested his stump on a chair. The drunk was outside waving the old man’s prosthetic leg around like a lightsaber.
I returned to Syed. She reminded me that Americans’ taxpayer dollars were turning to dust. I wasn’t sure how to explain to her that most Americans didn’t know whether or not their taxes had been raised to fund this war; that in America there was no draft; that in America we had an army staffed by farm kids and ghetto boys; that in America wars were waged because in America wars were easy to wage.
* * *
THE DAY OF the Afghan Chamber of Commerce meeting with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry at the five-star Serena Hotel—the only five-star hotel in Kabul—three or four Afghan guards stood dressed in full body armor and holding AK-47s, in front of two gates so high they resembled a drawbridge. Gunmen had attacked the Serena a few years earlier; at a party, I met an Afghan-American who had hidden in the basement while the militants shot up the gym. At both ends of the street, more guards stood upon little round stages, checking cars before they could pass in front of the hotel. A long row of Land Cruisers, Pajeros, and 4Runners, mostly in white, lined up to wait for their masters. Guards and drivers, representatives of Kabul’s security economy, draped their thin bodies over the hoods, smoking and staring.
When I stepped into the conference room of the beautiful hotel, Eikenberry stood at a lectern, speaking to a large audience. USAID women, their heads uncovered, sat in front. One hundred Afghan men, some in Western suits, some in traditional shalwar kameez, sat motionlessly, listening. No cell phones rang, though one man taped the speech with his camera phone. The event had the formal air of a midwestern business conference, but with much more luxurious surroundings.
Eikenberry had brought up the same aid problem that Syed had: foreigners were not buying Afghan products. To rectify this, the American embassy had recently launched a new program called Afghan First.
“We are purchasing as much local procurement as possible,” Eikenberry said. “Especially from local woodworkers … I’m very proud that if you go into our video teleconferencing room, our emblem of the United States was made here in Kabul. So every time the president sees me, he’s looking at an emblem made here in Kabul … The USAID economic growth program will increase and improve capacity building…”
Everybody in Kabul loved the phrase “capacity building.” Everyone talked about capacity building, building capacity, getting capacity up, improving, growing, and discovering capacity in the Afghans. I heard it so much that I wondered how it translated, whether bureaucratic jargon was actually translatable. Eikenberry said he was very proud to announce that “the new Afghan First website will be available in Dari and Pashto,” the native languages of Afghanistan.
He didn’t seem embarrassed to make this announcement nine years after the invasion, as if it were an important accomplishment rather than the most basic act of international friendship. Eikenberry was by all accounts a sincere man who cared deeply about Afghanistan, someone who tried his best. But I felt a crushing kind of pain in that room, to see an American leader behave in his faux jovial press-conference American way, seeming to believe his kindness was all that truly mattered. As he spoke, I was again reminded of the way Baldwin and Camus and so many others had described Americans, as people with no sense of tragedy.
Eikenberry offered the Afghans a chance to ask questions.
“An American contractor took money from me and fled,” said one.
“Why are cars being bought from Russian companies? I sell cars.”
“We have seen millions of dollars spent every year to help the private sector,” said a software developer, dressed in a Western suit. “But the same service we want to provide is also being provided by an NGO that gets funding from the EU. How can we compete with them?”
Eikenberry, an amiable, big man, fumbled a bit and deferred to the USAID staff. A woman stood up. She talked about China.
“That’s not just an Afghan problem but a global one…” She was grasping. “But, you know, it hasn’t been a problem for Bill Gates.”
I leaned over to the Afghan man sitting next to me. “Did she just say Bill Gates?”
He waved me away. Americans rarely took the blend-in-with-society approach to nation-building. I remembered the USAID woman I’d met on the plane, who had been transfixed by Sudoku pads and had gorgeous long, golden hair. When I’d asked her whether I should put on my head scarf before disembarking, she had just shrugged and said she never wore one. I was all ready to get angry at a fellow American for her cultural insensitivity, but I realized that the reason she never had to wear a head scarf was that she probably never left her compound at all.
Eikenberry stood up again and joked that he wished he could distract everybody with the promise of the great food waiting for them in the reception area so he didn’t “have to answer such hard questions.”
“I have to get back to the office for a teleconference with my president,” he said. “He will not be happy if I am late.” I wondered why Americans always spoke to grown men in foreign countries as if they were children; why in fact the Americans behaved like children.
We filed outside for food and drinks and business card trading, but many Afghans hung back, quietly standing in line to speak to the USAID folks one-on-one. The foreigners in that room controlled the Afghans’ livelihood. This was their chance. On my way out, an elderly American man exclaimed upon recognizing a friend, “Hey! Yeah, you know. Just another event at the Serena!”
I found Arif wolfing down some snacks in the foyer.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“They are just wasting our money.” He flicked his hand at the hotel and the food. “All this waste.”
* * *
AMERICA HAD a much longer history in Afghanistan than most Americans knew. Saadat Manto’s prediction in the 1950s that the Americans would resort to using the mullahs and the mujahideen to defeat the Soviet empire in Afghanistan came true. As early as the 1970s, even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA, the Pakistanis, and the Iranians began funding religious fighters to subvert the Socialist regime in Kabul. Islam, they believed—as they would in Turkey—was the only force strong enough to defeat communism.
The effect of this American policy was felt strongly in Pakistan, where it helped bring to power that country’s Islamic military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq. When the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie expressed outrage that American novelists never wrote about America’s actions abroad, she was in part thinking of America’s support for Zia. Then, the first time Americans were championing the “Afghan people’s right to freedom and self-determination,” they cared little that Pakistan’s dictator Zia was staging “public floggings and hangings, or when he passed a law which made it possible for a woman who had been raped to be stoned to death for adultery.” Karachi, the city where Shamsie grew up, was overcome by what she calls Kalashnikov culture. The Karachi port was the main conduit through which the United States sent arms to the Afghan mujahideen, and many of those weapons ended up in the hands of criminal groups and others throughout Karachi. “By the mid-eighties,” she says, “Karachi, my city, a once-peaceful seaside metropolis, had turned into a battleground for criminal gangs, drug dealers, ethnic groups, religious sects, and political parties—all armed. Street kids sold paper masks of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo; East met West in its adulation of the gun and its hatred of the godless Soviets.” There was so much trouble in her city that schools were regularly closed, and kids had to go through drills meant to protect them in case of bombs or riots. Security concerns even stopped cricket matches for almost two years.
For Shamsie, the face of “Islamicization” was Zia, the ally of Saudi Arabia and America. The weapons came with the building of more “Wahhabi mosques and madrasas.” Zia placed Shamsie’s uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. The future of Pakistan was changed forever by this American intervention, not only the political landscape and the possibilities of violence, but the way individuals related to God. As she notes: What was once devotion became fundamentalism. When American pundits and politicians lashed out after September 11 about the dangers of Islam, Shamsie thought such emotions terrifying in their reckless hypocrisy. During the Soviet-Afghan war, the United States and Pakistan together, in a supremely cynical alliance, had created a generation of Islamic fundamentalists—designing jihadi
textbooks and sending MANPADS into Afghanistan. Many of these fundamentalists also stayed behind in Pakistan, destabilizing the country, and eventually attracting hundreds of American drones to Pakistani skies.
“Please explain,” Shamsie asks, “why you are in our stories but we are not in yours.” She generously assumes that Americans want to fuse their own national stories with those of others, that they aspire to a greater complexity and understanding of their own motivations and actions. But as would become clear in Afghanistan, that was not at all what the Americans were trying to do.
* * *
IN 2009, GENERAL MCCHRYSTAL had promised a new counterinsurgency doctrine, which purportedly focused more on protecting Afghans and less on air strikes. At that time, many policy makers suggested that America was failing in Afghanistan in part because it was distracted by the war in Iraq, which was as comforting an argument as the one that explained away the loss in Iraq by invoking the Bush administration’s unpreparedness. Both arguments implied that Americans can and should win wars.
They served to distract from the more awful truth: America’s killing, in the stale military language of the time, “eliminated” no “enemies”—it killed people and created more enemies. According to the journalist Anand Gopal, military language obscured the realities of death and injury in Afghanistan, not just “errant bomb strikes” or the “mishandling” of “detainees,” but the intentional killing and torture of suspects and civilians. The Americans’ mandate was to track down any member of the Taliban, but since they did not know the country, they relied on the only people with the status, knowledge, and firepower to help them: violent Afghan warlords who fingered their own rivals so they would be persecuted by the United States. Across the country, the Americans, not unlike what they had done throughout Latin American countries during the Cold War, “carried out raids against a phantom enemy, happily fulfilling their mandate from Washington,” and in the process became a sort of warlord corporation in their own right. One American leaflet dropped by a plane in Kandahar read, “Get Wealth and Power Beyond Your Dreams. Help Anti-Taliban Forces Rid Afghanistan of Murderers and Terrorists.” Many of these Afghans—bread bakers, politicians, teenagers—were sent to the Americans’ jails at Bagram and Kandahar airfields, and at Guantánamo Bay. They were innocent. Many had even supported the American invasion.
