An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  If this is why he would not let me go, it makes no sense. If only he had agreed to a divorce, I would not have had to move for an annulment. What does he want with me? Does he really love me this much? If so, how could he have treated me so badly? If not, does he actually view me as his property? Is this possible—am I his runaway cow he must lure back home?

  He is certainly persistent—but his persistence is cruel and deceptive. Has he always been like this? I don’t think so. No. But living in Kabul has hardened him, changed him, perhaps returned him to the man he was supposed to become had he not gone to America.

  Even after he knows I’ve hired lawyers and am actively seeking a divorce and an annulment, Abdul-Kareem continues to share the intimate details of his life with me—just as if I were still his wife. He idealizes our relationship in the same way he once idealized life in Afghanistan.

  Abdul-Kareem writes to my lawyers explaining that he is still trying to convince me to give our marriage another chance because he loves me. To me he writes, “I’ll be honest with you, Darling, if you do not love me anymore, there is not a single thing in the world that I can do to keep you and there is not a single thing in the world that I wouldn’t do to make you come back to me.”

  How debonair he sounds. He is traveling and leading the glamorous life he always coveted. I am working and going to school and barely have time to sleep.

  On and on he goes, sharing all the names of famous artists he is meeting and befriending. “Satyajit Ray of India, Stanley Kramer, Peter Ustinov, Fellini, and many others. [Nothing but] parties, parties, and parties. I am invited to two or three different parties, every day. I feel I need a rest, but I am afraid I cannot get it.

  “How are you, Phyllis? Happy? Content? Remember me? Goodnight, my dear, I shall never stop loving you.”

  Two years pass. Toward the end of 1963 my lawyers advertise in a number of newspapers in New York City, a means of summoning Abdul-Kareem to appear in court in the matter of an annulment. He never appears. I am not sure if his lawyer even comes to the hearing. According to the legal documents, I am the sole witness. I do not remember testifying. In response to these legal events Abdul-Kareem writes, “I never expected us to come down to this—Oh, well—that is life—love must be answered with hate. . . . As your lawyer must have informed you, I cannot be served [with] a summons here and our case cannot be tried in a U.S. court. Legally, you are an Afghan citizen.”

  On March 20, 1964, two years and three months after I left Kabul, Judge Charles J. Beckinella grants me an annulment, which will be finalized in three months.

  I am now free to ask the Department of State to help me retrieve some of my possessions left behind—mainly my college papers and some books. I am told that “the United States Government has no jurisdiction over an Afghan national residing in Afghanistan.” However, Robert J. Carle, a State Department official, offers to approach the embassy in Kabul to see if an “informal approach” can be made.

  In 1965, eight months after the annulment is finalized, I write directly to Lowell B. Laingen, who works at the Afghanistan Desk in the State Department, and explain that Abdul-Kareem has promised, again and again, to return my papers to me. Finally, later that year, I hear from the American embassy in Kabul, from Thomas J. Wajda, the vice consul. He writes:

  While in my office, Mr. M. [Abdul-Kareem] mentioned that he is now having some difficulties with various Afghan authorities over your failure to return to Afghanistan. You may recall that when you left this country it was necessary for Mr. M. to guarantee your return. I assume that you now have no intention of returning to Afghanistan. If this is the case, you would probably be doing Mr. M. a great favor by returning your Afghan passport, and with it, a notarized statement concerning the annulment of your marriage. He would then, perhaps, be able to straighten things out with the passport authorities.

  What kind of tribal-totalitarian police state is this?

  Now, more than fifty years later, I believe that Abdul-Kareem could indeed have been held accountable for a missing Afghan passport or, rather, for a missing piece of Afghan property: me. I believe that he could have been punished for having brought an American bride home in the first place—and for then having lost her. He once mentioned that he spent a year in the army. I wonder, only now, if this was his punishment.

  The Afghan monarch and the country’s bureaucracy—that excuse for not getting things done, that system for leading people on for months and years and exacting whatever gain the individual clerk can obtain—has imprisoned and executed people for lesser crimes.

  Ten years after I left Kabul, I reread these letters. My conclusion then was that I was a pawn in the power struggle between Abdul-Kareem and his father. Abdul-Kareem wanted his foreign Jewish bride, his father did not think he had made a wise choice. Abdul-Kareem once wrote to say that he had broken with his father forever, that he had been disowned. Maybe his father would not give him the money with which to pursue me further. I believe that everything that happened in that country, from the king on down, was father controlled.

  I took only three things out with me when I left Kabul. One was a song that I carefully learned and that I still sing. Another was the bright turquoise nargileh, or water-pipe, that came from Mazar-i-Sharif. Last was my bright orange Afghan passport, which I have also kept—a memento of happier times, a memento of tragic times.

  Please allow me to apologize to Abdul-Kareem here and now—if indeed the nonreturn of my Afghan passport caused him any difficulties whatsoever.

  Nearly three years after I left, toward the end of 1964, Abdul-Kareem writes again, “Upon my arrival in Kabul I found a court document granting you an annulment. I must admit I was hurt. . . . We were so involved and I loved you so much that it is very difficult for me to accept that it is all over. Even now it doesn’t have to be! Well, I guess that is asking for too much. I’d like to help you in any way I can, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if there is anything I can do for you.”

  At the end of April 1965, the American embassy in Kabul received a sealed package that contained my college papers.

  It is over. I am legally free. I will never be free. Here I am, still writing about it all, trying to make sense of what happened and what it may mean to other people in the larger scheme of things.

  My young self may not have been wise, but she proved as strong, as persistent, and as adamant as her Afghan husband was. I was physically trapped and I got out. I was legally trapped and I got out, too. We were an evenly matched pair. Neither of us veered from our chosen path.

  My parents are no longer alive, but I owe them a profound debt of gratitude for standing by me—their rebel child.

  Abdul-Kareem once wrote, “I’d always hoped you’d use your time here to write a great novel—I know you can. Michener’s Caravans is not literature; I always expected that someday you would write the first novel about Afghanistan that deals with the life, people, etc., and you would do it here with love and great insight.”

  Ah, Abdul-Kareem, this is not a novel, but here I am, writing about us and about Afghanistan as best I can.

  Nine

  My Afghan Family Arrives in America

  In the decade after I left Afghanistan, I finished college and worked full time while attending graduate school. I was lucky. I returned to America when it was possible for a serious young woman to become truly independent. In less than a decade I received my doctorate and obtained a position as a professor of psychology.

  I was also privileged to have come of age when second-wave feminism was sweeping the country. I reported for duty in 1967, and by 1969 I was one of the many visible leaders of this extraordinary movement for women’s freedom.

  My Afghan experience taught me to recognize variations of sexism (or gender apartheid) everywhere, including in America.

  The civil rights movement: the voter regist
ration drives, sit-ins, and marches in the South were noble and tempting, but I could not go to Alabama or Mississippi and also finish school. Instead I joined the Northern Student Movement and tutored students in Harlem and in my East Village apartment. Like others, I ran into unexpected sexism and thus had many more illusions upended.

  Although I joined some anti–Vietnam War marches, and was considered more leftist than rightist, sexism among leftist men was as alive as it was among those who opposed such marches as unpatriotic and dangerous.

  Unlike many of my contemporaries, I no longer romanticized the masses or the people of the Third World. I knew too much about the oppression of women and men in at least one poor, illiterate, tribal, and religiously fundamentalist country. Thus, although I was a critic of sexism in America, I could no longer mindlessly demonize my own country or culture. I knew, firsthand, that it was far better here than elsewhere.

  I knew what could happen to a woman living in the developing world. It had nearly happened to me. I could not forget how close I had come to an imprisoned life and an early death. Thus I was always concerned with women everywhere, not only with women in America, most of whom at least had the right to battle for their rights without risking death at the hands of their families—or prison, torture, and death at the hands of the state.

  Such views set me apart from many in my activist generation.

  In 1969 I published an article in Mademoiselle about some of my experiences in Afghanistan. I had not forgotten about the country, but Afghanistan was not part of my work and was no longer on my mind.

  Abdul-Kareem and I no longer corresponded. I had no idea what he was doing or how he was. Still, I religiously clipped articles about Afghanistan whenever they appeared and kept them safe. I have them now.

  I may have left Abdul-Kareem, but I remained connected to other Muslims.

  I befriended Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, Saudis, Turks, Moroccans, Iranians, and Pakistanis. Many were interested in what I had experienced in Kabul and shared with me their own stories.

  I met Jihan Sadat and Raymonda Hawa Tawil (who became Yasir Arafat’s mother-in-law). I became friendly with the leading feminists of Egypt: Nawal El Saadawi and Laila Abou-Saif. In time I also met the academic Leila Ahmed.

  I met Middle Eastern filmmakers, Iranian anti-Shah activists, a Turkish Japanese feminist, a number of brave Saudi Arabian feminists, and two exceptionally glamorous and defiant feminists: Fatima Mernissi of Morocco and Rhonda Al-Fatal of Syria.

  I wonder: How are they now, where are they, are they alive and alright?

  By the end of 1979 I had published four books that had been translated into many European and into some Middle Eastern and Asian languages. I was working on a fifth book—and I was also the new mother of a wonderful one-year-old son.

  And then one day, toward the end of 1979, my phone rang.

  It was Abdul-Kareem.

  He wanted to meet.

  Disguised as a peasant, he had escaped from Soviet-infiltrated and now Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. He knew it was time to get out “once the Soviets massacred their own hand-picked puppet-leader, Daoud Khan, together with Daoud’s entire family, women, children and all.”

  Abdul-Kareem had been a deputy minister of culture and probably a member of Daoud’s cabinet.

  With only a toothbrush in his pocket he had crossed into Pakistan. After waiting in a one-room flat in Germany for five months, he, his wife, and their two young children flew to the West Coast; Boeing had promised him a job as a sales representative for Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Ruefully, and with a characteristic touch of Afghan absurdist humor, Abdul-Kareem said, “It took many months to get the necessary visas. By the time I arrived in America, Iran had already been taken over by the mullahs, Afghanistan by the Russians, and Turkey had decided to buy from McDonnell Douglas instead. Boeing had no need for me.”

  Abdul-Kareem got out of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, but before he escaped he had lived through nearly two decades of increasing Soviet infiltration.

  In his essay, “Soviet Military Involvement in Afghanistan” (which appears in Rosanne Klass’s major anthology, Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited), Yossef Bodansky writes, “Like their Tsarist predecessors, they [the Soviets] have always perceived their position in Central Asia in terms of global strategy. In August 1919 Leon Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee, ‘ . . . The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.’”

  In another essay, “The Road to Crisis 1919–1980: American Failures, Afghan Errors, and Soviet Successes,” in Klass’s anthology, Leon Poullada, an American diplomat and author, writes, “It was not until Moscow began paying increasing attention to Third World countries in the 1950s that a more active and permanent Soviet role became manifest. . . . Moscow’s influence in Kabul developed into a position of pre-eminence that was never threatened . . . by any outside powers.”

  During this time of post–World War II Soviet imperialism, America was unwilling to intervene or compete diplomatically, adopting instead a laissez-faire attitude toward Afghanistan. In her introduction to the anthology Klass documents America’s mistakes in regard to Afghanistan: “In 1953, then Prime Minister [and prince] Mohammed Daoud asked for American aid to update an army which consisted of a few World War I biplanes and horse-drawn artillery.” America rejected Daoud’s request, and “Daoud turned to Moscow for arms, and the patient Russian pachyderm . . . began to edge its way into Kabul.”

  As a result of America’s diplomatic miscalculations and Moscow’s business savvy, the Soviets found an ally in Mohammed Daoud Khan, a cousin of the king and prime minister from 1953 to 1963. At that time Daoud had been asked to leave his post. He sat at home and brooded. Then Daoud and the Soviets got rid of King Zahir Shah.

  Poor Abdul-Kareem! His adopted country, America, had let him—and America’s own interests—down. I feel terrible for him.

  Abdul-Kareem had dreamed of bringing his country into the twentieth century. Now the best he can hope for is to become a consultant on Afghanistan for the American government. Probably every other Afghan immigrant in town is looking for this kind of position. He gave a lecture at Freedom House about the five million Afghan refugees who had been displaced by the Soviet conflict and who were residing in Pakistan. He wanted to be of use, to undo the grievous harm to his country that was unfolding and continues to unfold.

  Abdul-Kareem thought I might be able to help him become established in America by writing an article about him, his escape, and his views. He wanted a portrait in the major media. So I obtained a commission from the New York Times Magazine for a piece I subsequently decided not to write.

  We talked for many hours and I taped our conversation. I wanted to help, but the material was overwhelming and, at the time, far too complicated for me to evaluate. (Klass’s anthology had not yet been published and I was really unfamiliar with the histories of Afghanistan.) Also, Abdul-Kareem’s emotions were too raw, even wild, and his political views seemed contradictory and confusing. I did not want to disappoint him—indeed I wanted him to understand that I did wield the power of the pen—yet I was afraid that publishing this interview would hurt rather than help him. He threatened to sue me if I did not go through with the project.

  I reminded him that in America a writer cannot be sued for nonperformance. He never mentioned the article again.

  Thirty-three years later, as I reread the transcription of this long interview, I find that it is historically priceless, a dramatic tale of how one man and his family experienced the gradual but heavy-handed Soviet takeover of their country.

  Only now do I appreciate the importance of what he was saying. I regret that I did not publish his story sooner. Still, I admit it: I was happy to see him and to reconnect.

  Until now, it was not easy for me to view him as a
figure on the stage of history. Mainly I viewed him as my former husband—just as he viewed me as his former wife. I hereby want to acknowledge that Abdul-Kareem has always favored a modern constitutional democracy. He stands on record for individual liberty and even women’s rights—so long as each husband can still limit the rights of his own wife. He is so proud that Afghanistan passed a constitution in 1964.

  Abdul-Kareem is secular. The Bolsheviks were also secular—but their arrogant and heartless infiltration of his country—their essentially totalitarian nature—frightened and disgusted him. In retrospect, as I revisit this interview, I am again reminded of why the barefoot Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors) became so popular, not just in Afghanistan but around the world. They took on the Soviet giant with only their faith and their will to remain independent. They were the ultimate underdogs in a victim-worshipping era.

  The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence spy and government leadership did not want to lose control of the border territory between Pakistan and Afghanistan; they found Afghan warlords who could be bought and were of like minds. The Afghan warlords did not want the Soviets to occupy and change their country. The Islamist Arabs viewed the battle against the Soviets as a religious jihad—and Afghanistan as a good place to train Muslim holy warriors for the future global jihad. At the time no one understood that the heroic holy warriors would one day become the savage Taliban or al-Qaeda.

  Americans and Europeans did not understand that war was a permanent way of life for the Afghan tribes and that the Afghan warlords who subsequently arose would never stop trying to destroy each other at the expense of the Afghan civilian population.

  In the mid-1980s the British American journalist and author Jan Goodwin visited Afghanistan twice and embedded herself among the mujahideen—the only woman among the brothers. In 1987 she published a dramatic book about the experience: Caught in the Crossfire. The cover shows a turbaned Goodwin in male dress among the warriors, and the book is subtitled The True Story of an American Woman’s Secret and Perilous Journey with the Freedom Fighters Through War-torn Afghanistan.