by Sarah Chayes
In keeping with Achekzai tradition, the family’s five adult sons worked in the transport trade. Nazir Ahmad was a machinist, honing auto engine parts on his spinning lathe. The others worked in the shop of the eldest, Nissar Ahmad, in one of the city’s oil-splotched car yards, tricking out huge cargo trucks with fanciful decorations: panels painted with elaborate scenes and framed by metal curlicues, meeting in a towering point high above the truck’s cab like the prow of a ship. And around the skirts, a fringe of jingling metal ornaments that would lend a truck’s struggle over bumpy roads the sound of a glad-hearted festival. In one of the most impoverished countries on earth, truck owners will lay down thousands to tart up their prize possessions. My Achekzai brothers made sure they got their money’s worth. The shop was famous for Nissar Ahmad’s embossing on chrome plates. I would visit him sometimes and watch him work, sitting cross-legged on the ground, holding the plate down with one bare foot. He still owes me a fish, complete with scales and an eye, like the ones he uses to finish off the bottom panels of the truck broadsides, sometimes five or six feet long.
The brothers were short and a little stocky. When they left the house in the morning, piling into their white station wagon with their shawls slung around them against the cold, I could not shut out the picture of myself as Snow White, with the brothers playing my five dwarves. “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go…”
Each of the four older ones had four or five kids. I never did get completely straight who was whose. Willowy, black-haired Gulali used to follow me everywhere, getting into my stuff, pouring water for me to wash my hands, and fetching a thermos of tea or my notebooks for me. Unable to speak more than a few words in her language, I must have seemed like a toddler to her, and she would mother me importantly, as though I were her doll. Sadia was the mischievous one, always scrapping with the other kids. Four-year-old Guldani flirted inveterately, sidling up to my imposing driver. One of the baby boys, Tawwab, took an unaccountable shine to me. He would sit in my lap as I lay on a mat spread outside in the evenings, lean back against my raised knees, and place his feet, with careful deliberation, in my face.
Mahmad Anwar would come over with some fighters every once in a while to check on me. Sometimes he would spend the night with us in the maelmastun. And I often stopped by his headquarters to hear the latest. Despite its dignified exterior and its location on the main thoroughfare, it was an utterly unsalubrious place: walls discolored and flaking, no running water, leftover food drying in the corners.
Mahmad Anwar welcomed me unquestioningly. With a warm salutation, the nappy fighters on the door would usher me upstairs, accepting me as one of their own. I learned how to greet the people gathered in Mahmad Anwar’s office with the ritual that Afghans perform when they enter a room. Everyone stands up, and you shake hands all around, greeting each person in turn. If you know someone well, there is a kind of dance step you do: left hand to your friend’s right shoulder, right hand to his waist. Then you take a half step back and let your right hand slide across to his, and clasp it. One of Mahmad Anwar’s friends did this with me once, and put his right hand smack on top of my bosom. He almost died. The optical illusion had worked too well; he had actually thought I was a man. Handshakes done, everyone sits back down, and the greetings go around again, the newcomer meeting the eyes of each person in turn, wishing him peace, asking after his health and family.
It seemed oddly contradictory to me: the dignity and ceremony of this salutation, performed by the otherwise wild Achekzais.
Mahmad Anwar never tried to hide anything from me. When I showed up, day or night, I was ushered into his cramped and misshapen situation room: dirty carpet on the floor, dirtier mattresses as a bedding/seating combo, a leaning stack of ammunition boxes in a corner, a few Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Whatever he was discussing, I was welcome to follow along. Often it had to do with disarming leftover bands of Taliban in Helmand Province to the west. In private, I would give him advice, similar to what I had told those opium dealers. He really had to clean up his headquarters, I said. And he should not be allowing his men to smoke pot. It was giving them a bad reputation.
Mahmad Anwar loved to swagger around in the olive green U.S. Army parka the Americans had issued him, with its fur-trimmed hood. His men were wearing the traditional Afghan outfit of baggy trousers, long tunic, turban or sparkly cap, shawl slung over one shoulder. But a rough sort of uniform was starting to shake out in Kandahar. Western-style clothing was coming to be a badge of the new regime. Security officers like Mahmad Anwar wore fatigues, provincial officials wore shirts and ties, even teachers wore Western clothes in school. But they would not be caught dead in them on the street; tight trousers, exposing the shape of a man’s legs all the way up to his crotch, were just too unseemly by local standards. Teachers brought their school clothes to work and changed in the cramped communal space of what passed for a teachers’ lounge.
And so I spent my time trying to describe life in post-Taliban Kandahar to my unseen audience a world away.
One afternoon, I was working on a piece for Morning Edition. My deadline was coming at me like a cavalry charge, and I was transfixed with concentration. Suddenly—I could have killed him—one of my host-brothers shattered it. He rushed into my sanctum with some flustered noise about the chief of police. On his heels scampered the little girls to straighten up the room. It was like the flight of wild creatures ahead of a forest fire.
A moment later a mighty man entered, one of the largest I have ever seen. He was surrounded by four or five bodyguards. Their presence seemed to use up all the space in the room. It was Zabit Akrem. So this is the big man I’ve been hearing about. Mahmad Anwar’s boss.
For, when Shirzai seized the governorship, President Karzai gave the provincial security apparatus to Mullah Naqib’s Alokozais, to preserve some balance of power. Zabit Akrem reaped the police department.
Akrem and his soldiers sat themselves down and began making small talk. After a curt salutation, I turned and went back to smacking my keyboard.
“Sarah,” my host-brother interrupted after a minute. “Mr. Commander wants to speak to you.”
“I’m busy. He’ll have to wait till I’m done.” Unbelievable affrontery.
“Sarah.” My host brother’s tense voice broke a silence. “Zabit Akrem is a big person. He doesn’t have much time. He wants to talk to you for a minute.”
I sighed and flounced around to face him.
Foreigners, Akrem informed me, were forbidden to live in private houses. I would have to move out of the compound for my “safety,” and take up quarters at the hotel.
I was indignant. Suddenly there were laws in Afghanistan, and staying in a private home was against them? That filthy excuse for a hotel was infested with fellow journalists, not to mention seedy-looking Afghans haunting the halls. There were only one or two women reporters, and I didn’t fancy walking around with my hair drying in front of a lot of unknown Afghan men. I knew my safety and ability to work in hidebound Kandahar depended on my reputation. Living as part of a family put me in a category that made sense, culturally. And it fit in with the protection precept I was going by. I was here under the protection of the Achekzai tribe. Staying with an Achekzai family offered a lot more security than living with a bunch of other foreigners guarded by a few paid gunmen. And another thing. Those gunmen, I understood, were Akrem’s tribesmen. Their other job was to keep tabs on where reporters went. Just freed from police-state conditions in Quetta, where we had to dream up ruses to shake the intelligence agents assigned to us for our “protection,” I had no intention of submitting to that nonsense again.
“Sorry, I’m not going,” I informed Akrem. “I have a father here, and five strong brothers. I’m much safer here in ‘my’ house than in any hotel. Besides, I’m leaving in a few days.”
We haggled for a while, the brothers backing me up. Finally I won out, Akrem agreeing that I could finish out my rotation in the house.
I me
t him again a little later, the first week in January 2002, in his office at the police department. A crack journalist from Time magazine, Michael Ware, and I had come up with a harebrained scheme to strike off across the vast deserted wasteland of Helmand Province to the west of Kandahar, in search of fighting with Al-Qaeda. Mick wanted to take along some police fighters for protection. And when Akrem found out and wanted to talk, Mick conveniently had an urgent deadline and asked if I would go.
It was more than a little intimidating to face him in his office, stars on his shoulders, surrounded by uniformed fighters, scarcely glancing up from behind his massive wooden desk.
“I thought you were leaving,” he said. Yeah, well…Heart pounding, I told him a fairy tale about having some friends I wanted to visit in the Helmand Province capital. I said I would only go that far. “So, you’ve got a lot of buddies with black turbans,” Akrem retorted, meaning Taliban. I let it go and retired, just about backing out of the room the way courtiers did in ancient Persia before the king of kings. I heard him say in a stage whisper aside: “These foreigners tell a lot of lies.”
“It’s true,” I told him later, when we became friends. “I was lying. But you lied to me, too!” He threw back his head and laughed.
With the exception of one other hostile meeting the next spring, Akrem and I did not exchange another word for almost a year.
One day in early January, school was ready to open. It would be the first time in about a decade. I simply could not resist taking my three littlest girls up the road to register, with hundreds of other yelling, zooming, laughing, excited neighborhood children, after they had all but somersaulted into the maelmastun, where I was at work, squealing and mimicking the act of writing with fingers on their miniature palms: “We’re-going-to-school, we’re-going-to-school, we’re-going-to-school!” It seemed a historic errand, a more important task than finishing my piece for All Things Considered. My grip on precisely what my mission was here in Kandahar was loosening.
From rueful experience, I could recognize signs of approaching burnout: a frenetic tinge to my energy when it rose, and, like a background monotone, a fatigue, a growing lassitude that had been creeping up on me and was now upon me, blinding me to stories. Even so, I eyed the approaching end of my NPR tour, in early January 2002, with a sense of dislocation and some loss.
I ended up overstaying my scheduled departure date. And only with some difficulty did I resolve to turn my back at last on this uncouth city that had wormed its way into my heart. I stopped off for a series of raucous or formal good-byes: with my adoptive family—they sprinkled water behind my departing yellow car in a Pashtun tradition—and with Ahmad Wali Karzai, the younger brother President Hamid had left behind to hold down the fort in Kandahar, and, when I set off on that bone-crushing road to Spin Boldak and Pakistan, with my various Achekzai comrades at the border.
At the barracks where I had first been assigned the young bodyguard Fayda, one of the scruffy fighters asked me, “Are you a journalist?”
“She’s our journalist,” his comrades chorused.
And so the love affair began.
CHAPTER 12
THE BORDER
1838–1898
I STOOD WEDGED against a table that took up three quarters of a room at the cramped Pakistani border post. A stumpy, round-headed bureaucrat refused to glance up in my direction. Before him was a vast ledger, its pages rising in symmetrical hills from the center binding and extending at least two feet across on either side. He would glance at it, then page through my passport, rubbing each leaf voluptuously against its neighbor, then run his finger down the hand-printed names and dates in the book. Because of that Achekzai motorcycle ride a month back, which skirted this very border post, my passport lacked the stamp he was looking for. Having not legally exited Pakistan, I was going to have a hard time legally entering it again. I wished there was a way to get to France without setting foot across the border.
That border is a sore subject, and has been for a century. Where precisely the line separating Afghanistan and Pakistan even lies is a subject of violent contention, a lightning rod for seething resentment, animosity, and mistrust between the two deeply entangled neighbors. The porosity I enjoyed in the company of my Achekzai friends; the thoroughfares that insurgents could take across the frontier—unpaved tracks across crags and sandpits, or gates opened by acquiescent Pakistani border guards—the repeated Pakistani encroachments, as troops strayed across the line to tumble into firefights with U.S. soldiers, or as officials edged the line forward, moving Pakistani border posts into Afghanistan; all these manifestations of the unsolved conflict would enormously complicate the U.S. mission in southern Afghanistan in the months ahead.
The manifestations are the symptoms of an underlying attitude. During my stay in Quetta, I came to sense that much of Pakistani officialdom thought of Afghanistan as something like the vacant lot behind their house. A place they effectively owned, could unload their junk in, or put to more serious use should occasion require. I started hearing about a notion called strategic depth. In the calculus of their ongoing confrontation with India, it seemed that successive governments in Islamabad postulated Afghanistan as an extension of their territory, land to fade back or retreat to, or base their missiles on, if it ever came to war. And it seemed that much of Pakistani policy in recent decades had been aimed at securing unrestricted access to that territory.
This attitude has hardly been kept secret. Kandahar’s telephone exchange under the Taliban, for example, was the same as Quetta’s—with a Pakistani country code. In 2003, Zabit Akrem received a most unsettling warning, delivered in person by the messenger of a well-known colonel of the Pakistani ISI named Faisan. “Where you are now,” the messenger said, “will soon be part of Pakistan.”
Akrem sent back the reply that Afghanistan has a rather longer history than Pakistan’s, and will likely outlast it.
Afghans, meanwhile, nurture a reciprocal proprietary attitude toward much of northern Pakistan. Just about all the refugees I met in Quetta considered the ground under our feet to be part of their native country. I had a hard time taking them seriously, but they were quite worked up about it. Even the scarcely literate would go on at me about something called the Durand Line. Everybody had something to say about it, none of it complimentary. This line, which constitutes Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, was no longer valid, the Afghans kept insisting.
Local lore holds that the treaty establishing the border expired after a hundred years, meaning the line was now defunct. Clearly, the root of the trouble went back to that treaty, to the original drawing of the line. If I was to begin to sort out in my mind the legitimacy of the competing assertions, I was going to have to examine the circumstances that gave rise to it.
A hundred years, I mused, listening to the Afghan refugees. That puts us in the middle of the Great Game. The term conjured up Rudyard Kipling for me, and not a whole lot else. All I really knew was that it was another face-off between two empires across the Asian landmass, with Kandahar marking the centerline, as usual. I hate the nineteenth century, but I could see I was going to have to get into it. Otherwise, the persistent Pakistani interference in Afghan affairs, and Afghans’ burning resentment of a neighbor that shared their religion and their recent opposition to the Soviet colossus, were not going to make much sense.
The two seminal works about the Great Game available in bookstores, when I finally made it home, proved mind numbing.1 But by shutting out a lot of the details, I could begin to discern the main lines of the story. This border, it emerged, had been a running argument for decades among the amirs of the young Afghan state—the successors of Ahmad Shah Durrani—and the heirs to the Moghul dynasty in India, the imperial British.
Throughout the nineteenth century, as Britain extended and tightened her grasp on lands in India, her policy toward Afghanistan, India’s northern neighbor, was, in the understated words of the most important Afghan ruler of the day, “subject to
occasional fits and changes.”2 In fact, British policy tacked quite radically back and forth, like a sailboat in a contrary wind.
Britain, at that time, was caught up in a huge worldwide contest between superpowers—the Cold War of the day. Its rival was Russia. And Russia, during that century, was relentlessly expanding across Central Asia at the expense of Muslim amirs who ruled oasis city-states in such ancient capitals as Merv, Bukhara, and Tashkent.
This Russian expansion, in the view of most British policymakers, was not aimed merely eastward, to push the borders of the czars’ land toward the edge of its continent—much as the United States was expanding westward across her own continent during those years. The British were sure that Russia had designs on English lands in India too.
The two books I was reading disagreed strongly about the nature of this Russian threat to the English Indian dominions. So did the British at the time.
The conservative Tory Party’s assessment of the Russian threat was alarmist, and its reaction to it, hawkish. An imminent Russian danger was the postulate in all the Tory leaders’ equations. Their consensus on how best to counter it was that the best defense was a good offense. That is, most Tories judged that the best way to keep the Russians out of India was to move forward toward Russia and take over Afghanistan in whole or in part. As it happened, this “forward policy” led the British Empire to one of its most scorching military defeats since the American Revolution.
The Liberal Party, by contrast, was sometimes inclined to make light of the Russian threat. And the favored liberal solution to the Russian problem was rather dovish: to stay put in India, befriending a locally acceptable Afghan leader and allowing him and his fanatically independent people to serve as the subcontinent’s gatekeeper. This course effectively halted Russia’s military advance on Afghanistan until 1979.
