The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  It was not as though this man didn't like animals. Over his horse, he had thrown a large kilim saddle blanket with thirty bands of color that must have taken six weeks to weave. But a dog was religiously polluting, dirty, and dangerous. Later, Afghans were variously to describe Babur as big, strong, ferocious, useless, tired, or decrepit. I called him beautiful, wise, and friendly. Afghans would traditionally only use such adjectives for a man, a horse, or a falcon.

  Babur on day one, asleep

  COMMANDANT HAJI (MOALEM) MOHSIN KHAN OF KAMENJ

  We walked on through hills whose brilliant colors showed metal ores in the soil: a rock face striped like candy, a crest of snow-softened russet, then slopes of green and orange sandstone, and finally a cliff streaked with bull's blood red. After four hours we reached the compound of Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan at Kamenj.

  It snowed throughout the afternoon, and I spent much of my time looking at Babur on the veranda of Haji Mohsin's house. I gave the dog some nan bread, and like a bear, he held it between his large paws as he tore strips off with his mouth. When he had finished he sniffed earnestly around the pillars to see if he could find any crumbs and then flopped down with his head between his paws and closed his eyes. When he slept, the wrinkles on his forehead made it look as though he were anxious. I returned to the guest room.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Wazir, Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan's servant, entered, kicked the snow from his boots, and laid a new water pipe by the stove. It was warm inside the room, and Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan leaned back against the cushions, letting his camel-hair gown fall open from his thin chest and fingering his gray beard, as though congratulating himself on its length and unusually neat shape. A young man and his father were in the room, having walked a full day from their village to see Haji Mohsin, but he had barely spoken to them. The young man mixed the cannabis and tobacco for Haji Mohsin's water pipe.

  When the pipe was placed in front of him, Haji Mohsin sat up, swung the tail of his silk turban over his shoulder, put the pipe's stem between his lips, and inhaled. After a few sharp breaths he passed it to the old man and asked me whether I had had enough to eat. Although Haji Mohsin was a grand feudal commander, he had fed us only dry bread. I thanked him.

  "Green tea or black tea?"

  "Green, please."

  Wazir walked back into the snow to fetch the tea, and the commandant leaned forward to pick up my rosary beads and put his own plastic beads in his pocket. For a few minutes he ran my beads through his hands, watching the light on the opaque Tibetan amber.

  Silence.

  Through a small window I could see the snow falling on his orchard and on the water pump and lavatories marked with the acronym of an international aid agency. The compound was some way from the village and on the other side of the fast Hari Rud River, so that no one but Haji Mohsin's immediate family could use this sanitary gift from the people of Scandinavia.

  The boy passed the water pipe back, saying "Commandanthajimohsinkhan," as though the commandant's name were a single word. Commandant indicated that Mohsin was a military commander, Haji meant he was wealthy enough to have performed the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, Khan that his family had been one of the two largest landowners in this district for a couple of hundred years. I had read an account of his family written by British officers in 1885. They described his forebears as hereditary rulers of one of the Aimaq confederacies. It was normal that such a man be in charge of a visiting guest, just as he was in charge of deciding where the development agency put their lavatory and water pump.

  "Show me your letters of introduction," said Commandant Haji Mohsin.

  I gave him the letter from Gul Agha Karimi. He scowled and laid it aside, muttering that Gul Agha had collaborated with the Russians. Then I handed him the letter from Agha Ghori and the one Abdul Haq had persuaded the young Commandant Mustafa to write. They were supposed to introduce me to everyone along the way, but Haji Mohsin put them in his pocket. Keeping the letters would allow him to ask favors from these men in the future.

  "Can I have them back?" I asked.

  "No. They're for me."

  "But I need them for others along the way."

  "Then they should have given you more than one copy. I will give you letters of introduction to the others."

  I went outside. Babur was asleep on the edge of the veranda. A thick crust of snow had collected on his left flank. I led him down to the Hari Rud. He looked gloomily at the water and then at me, but he wouldn't drink. I led him a little farther upstream, stepped onto a rock in the river, and waited. He scooped up water with his tongue so it spattered his chops and dribbled from his large lips. He drank for a full minute and then raised his head. I waited. He drank again.

  When I returned to the house, the others stood to greet me, but Haji Mohsin merely raised an eyebrow and continued smoking on his cushion. His air of superiority apparently reflected his social position. Unlike many feudal lords, he had retained his land and power throughout the war.

  "Agha Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan, what have you been doing for the last twenty-five years?" I asked.

  "Well, originally I was a malem—a teacher." Others fixed the title "Moalem" to their name, in the fashion of doctors in the West, but Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan had enough titles already. "Then I fought the Russians as a Mujahidin and they dropped sixteen bombs on Kamenj, killing forty-five of my villagers. When the Northern Alliance took Kabul, I was made Head of Security in Chaghcharan. Then, when the Taliban came into power, I retired to my estate and played no further part. I am still retired."

  Haji Mohsin's guests had come to discuss politics, though, and from the tone of the discussion I couldn't believe he had been retired for five years. His family had attended the Loya Jirga assemblies of the previous kings and they expected to attend the new assembly.

  "Will you join Karzai's party?" asked the young man's father.

  Haji Mohsin Khan said nothing, focusing on his water pipe.

  Five minutes later, he was asked again.

  "I am old and tired, this is nothing to do with me," said Haji Mohsin Khan.

  Ten minutes later the old man asked for a third time and got the answer he had perhaps expected.

  "With all respect to this British boy," drawled Haji Mohsin Khan, indicating me, "Karzai is a tool of the British and the Americans and I will not be supporting him."

  Later I learned that Haji Mohsin Khan had not been in retirement during the Taliban era. He had defected to the Taliban and become their district commander; he and his brother-in-law, Rais Salam Khan, had opened fire on Ismail Khan's party, killing two senior lieutenants, as Ismail Khan made his final march on Herat. Haji Mohsin Khan was therefore under threat from Herat. If I had still been with Qasim or Abdul Haq, Ismail Khan's men, entering this house would have been impossible.

  Much of the afternoon and evening was defined by the rhythm of Haji Mohsin's mosque. Three times between lunch and nightfall, Haji Mohsin's private mullah walked out into the garden and, with the snow falling gently around him, sang the call to prayer for Haji Mohsin's private mosque. Three times the commander and his guests disappeared and returned again to their water pipes and cups of tea.

  For dinner, Haji Mohsin gave us a small piece of salted meat each and a plateful of rice which we shared. Perhaps without my armed escort I no longer had the status to deserve a serious meal, or perhaps he enjoyed serving frugal food to a foreigner.

  Haji Mohsin Khan

  After supper, eaten as usual in silence, he leaned close enough that I could smell the tobacco on his breath and said, "Rome—Riga—Madrid—Kiev—names, correct?"

  "Correct."

  "Do you build ships in Britain?"

  "Not any longer."

  "You see," he said to the group, "in Britain they are so rich from stealing when they ruled the world that they pay their workers a fortune. They do not need to manufacture—they import everything from America and Japan, where labor is cheaper."

&nbs
p; "Is England very rich?" asked the old man.

  "Of course," said Haji Mohsin. "It all looks like Dubai."

  Wazir stuck his head through the door. "At least a meter of snow has fallen now. The foreigner will be here for two months."

  The old man whispered something and they all laughed.

  "Twenty-five years getting rid of the foreigners," said Haji Mohsin's younger brother, "and here they are again."

  Everyone laughed.

  "He better be careful," said the old man, "or we'll do to him what we did to the CIA officer in Kunduz." The CIA officer in Kunduz had been killed.

  "He can't really think that dog can defend him against wolves?" asked the young man.

  "Don't forget his metal-tipped staff," said Haji Mohsin, for once forgetting his dignity and rolling onto his back on the cushion laughing.

  The next morning it was still snowing and they tried to persuade me not to go. They said if there was a meter of snow in Kamenj there must be two meters in Chaghcharan. But I didn't want to be trapped in Kamenj for two months.

  Wazir, wrapped in three jackets, led Babur and me out through Haji Mohsin's orchards. He walked with a rolling seaman's stride and kicked the snow high into the air with his tall leather boots. The snow lay heavy on the thin black branches of apple and mulberry trees and formed a thick crust on the drystone walls. Babur padded happily alongside us, making his own tracks in the fresh powder. But it took both of us to drag him across the ice on the river.

  As we entered a broad valley, the snow stopped falling, the sun broke out of the clouds, and we saw other footprints.

  "Where are you from, Wazir?" I asked.

  "I am the man of Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan. I fought for him during the jihad, went into hiding from the Russians with him in these mountains, and work for him now for my bread. He is a good man."

  After another mile, the valley narrowed and the mountains were suddenly alive with figures—following the ridges, tumbling down the slopes, and beating the hills for wolves. Men waited with large dogs at the bottleneck on the valley floor.

  It looked like a dangerous point for either a wolf or an army. I said so to Wazir.

  "We were encircled here by Najib's troops," he replied, "and forty men were executed there." He pointed to a slender stream running gently between the snowfields and the orchards.

  I presumed then that it was Haji Mohsin Khan's troops who had been executed. But that evening I was told the story again and it seemed the victims were on the other side. President Najib had ordered a helicopter-borne Special Forces operation to disarm Haji Mohsin. Ten of Haji Mohsin's men were killed but many of Najib's men were captured. Three of them were locals whose names people still remembered: Maulani Jalami, Hazrat Gul, and Akbar Mohammed. Haji Mohsin had executed them in front of the villagers.

  Outside Guk three dogs—one a sort of husky—came snarling at us with their teeth bared. I raised a stone to warn them to keep back, but Babur padded along solemnly as though they were not there. Wazir told me to put my stone down. When I did, the lead husky sprinted forward and sprang on Babur's back, sinking his teeth in. Babur turned, enraged, and flung the husky to the ground; the other two dogs charged in and I ran at them, swinging my staff. I hit one hard and it retreated whimpering. I didn't like hitting dogs but I was not prepared to let a mongrel savage Babur and I was furious with Wazir for letting it get to this stage. For the rest of our morning together, Wazir flung a stone whenever a dog looked at us.

  As we turned up the side valley to Garmao, we saw a column of men approaching, seven of them on foot and the last one on a white horse. They all wore webbing and carried rifles. They passed without greeting us.

  "Who are they?" I asked Wazir.

  "I don't know. They're not from around here."

  By Haji Mohsin Khan

  COUSINS

  Three kilometers farther up the valley, we reached the village of Garmao, where I was to stay. We entered the guest room and found a very tall man sitting by the door, surrounded by bodyguards. Judging by his manner and his escort, he should have been in the senior position at the other end of the room. Something was wrong. He was not talking to his host; he refused to acknowledge Wazir; and after asking me sharply if I had a satellite phone, he left. Our host, Seyyed Umar, watched him leave and then said, "Once I would have killed a sheep for that man—now he is lucky I gave him tea." Then he ordered someone to bring me an omelet. I was hungry and grateful.

  Seyyed Umar's treatment of the tall man was a symptom of the rapid shifts in power that had followed the coalition bombardment. The flat plains were half controlled by militias such as Qasim's operating out of Herat. But in the hills of Ghor, I was moving between Aimaq leaders who were barely speaking to each other and stumbling over differences only partly visible to me.

  Islam does not encourage strong social distinctions, and the war and social revolutions in villages had destroyed many of the old feudal structures in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, villagers were very aware of one another's backgrounds. A multitude of points of etiquette, tradition, and tribal identities differentiated a servant such as Wazir from a feudal lord like Haji Mohsin and Haji Mohsin from a middle-class vet like Dr. Habibullah Sherwal or an upwardly mobile mullah such as the young commander of Obey. Class did not necessarily reflect education and experience. My current host, Seyyed Umar, was a wealthy man from a respected family of landowning clergy, but he could not read or write and had never been abroad. Abdul Haq, who was from a much humbler background, was literate and had traveled. What mattered was power and that depended on allies.

  Many of my hosts had been war leaders. Most of them had fought against the Russians but not all for the same groups. Haji Mohsin and the red-bearded Agha Ghori had been among the leading Jamiat commanders in the province, but the headman of the dog's village was a commander for the Pakistani-funded warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

  A few, such as Gul Agha Karimi—who wrote my letters of introduction—had worked with the Russians. He and some others seemed to have been largely forgiven for collaborating. But the Russian chief of the KGB-KHAD who ordered the planes to bomb Haji Mohsin's village would be killed if he stepped into this area.32

  Things became even more complicated under the Taliban era because anti-Russians found themselves on opposite sides. Some men, such as Agha Ghori, genuinely retired. Haji Mohsin Khan had been pro-Taliban and was therefore allowed to run the valleys for five years during the Taliban period.

  The defeat of the Taliban meant that everything changed again in less than two months. The anti-Taliban commander33 had now taken back control of the area from Haji Mohsin and was policing Haji Mohsin's territory with his own men from Shahrak. This was why Wazir did not recognize the gunmen who passed us on the snowfields. Meanwhile, Haji Mohsin was refusing to hand over his Taliban deputy.34

  My host, Seyyed Umar, was the man of Haji Mohsin Khan, while the tall guest who had just left was the man of Haji Mohsin's enemy. But ten years earlier they had stood beside each other to shoot Najibullah's men by the river.

  "Why did you become a Mujahid?" I asked Seyyed Umar.

  "Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys."

  "And why did you fight the Taliban?"

  "Because they forced my women to wear burqas, not head scarves, and stole my donkeys."

  It seemed if the government did not interfere with his women's headdress and his donkeys he would not oppose it. But Seyyed Umar had not fought the Taliban. As Haji Mohsin Khan's man, he had been one of their representatives.

  There were five of us in the guest room and for two hours we sat in silence. It was an overcast afternoon. Seyyed Umar sat by a large window, clicking his rosary. He shifted his head to look down at the black ridge, the mud below the river, and the tracks in the snow. Occasionally he sighed or cleared his throat. Outside a door creaked and a horse whinnied. Half an hour later, two ragged men and their donkeys came up the hill, and the childre
n of the village threw snowballs at them. The men, exhausted at the end of their day's journey, smiled.

  Seyyed Umar and the others could not work in the fields because of the snow; they had lived here together since they were children; nothing had happened recently that was worth talking about, and they were illiterate. Throughout the long afternoon they waited in silence for the call to prayer, dinner, and bed.

  A hundred years ago this valley had been uninhabited. Seyyed Umar's great-grandfather was a mullah who came here from the mountains in the south. Four local landlords each gave him a plot of land—and on each plot he placed one of his sons and built a village. Garmao was one of those villages. Its plot had been given by Haji Mohsin's ancestor and had passed eventually to three of the mullah's grandsons—one of whom was sitting in the room with me. Eighty-two male descendants of the mullah's son lived in Garmao (Seyyed Umar could not be bothered to count the women), and the plot of land, which had been generous for one man, was now overcrowded. Everyone had either married a cousin from the village or a second cousin from one of the other three original villages.

  Dramatic differentials of wealth and power had emerged among the descendants in forty years. Seyyed Umar was a wealthy man and a much more generous host than his chief, Haji Mohsin. In addition to the omelet for lunch, he served me a whole chicken (a much more expensive delicacy here than lamb) with rice, a clear beef broth, a bowl of fried lentils, and soaked bread crumbs in rehydrated goat's curd. I had had difficulty convincing Haji Mohsin to let me have even a little bread for the dog. Seyyed Umar gave me four loaves for Babur, to which I added a little meat when the others weren't looking. But Seyyed Umar's first cousin was in rags. He was older than Seyyed Umar and paralyzed on his right side. He sat in the corner, muttering to himself over a cleft tongue. He begged for money and I gave him some.