The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  And made captives of their men and women;

  Those who were far off too we followed and made prisoners

  We took their wives and children.

  Fourteen or fifteen of the most noted insurgents and robber chiefs of the Hazara had fallen into our hands. It was my intention to put them to death with torture at our halting ground, as an example and terror to all rebels and robbers; but Qasim Beg happening to meet them, was filled with unseasonable commiseration, and let them go: (As Saadi, the Persian poet, writes...)

  To do good to the bad is the same thing

  As to do evil to the good;

  Salt ground does not produce Spikenard;

  Do not throw away good seed on it.

  PALE CIRCLES IN WALLS

  We continued up to the Shaidan pass. My pack seemed to force me into the ground and the struggle to move narrowed my awareness to little more than my breathing. My head came down to watch the path; my thoughts settled, burrowing into the movement. I moved in slow steps like the donkey. Babur's head was sunk down, his tongue lolling out, and I knew if I let him off the leash he'd stop entirely.

  On the Shaidan ridge we paused on a path littered with antiaircraft shells. The Taliban had used this position to fire on the Hazara planes at Shibartu. The village of Shaidan looked beautiful as we descended. Its fields were broad beside the river. The ornate octagonal towers of the castle stood above a mud bazaar of eighty shops leading to the courtyards of a seminary. Ancient poplars lined the landlords' orchards. The old caves in the cliff were set with wooden windows, and above them a fifteen-thousand-foot snow peak rose against a dark blue sky.

  But when I reached the first building, I realized this was a ghost town. The shops were smoothly rendered in dark soot. In Kabul, where machine guns and high explosives had struck concrete, there were pockmarks or craters. Here, because the buildings were mud, there were no such marks. The fire had consumed the lintels and rafters and left crisp shells of baked mud. In some the charred stumps of roof beams remained; in others there were pale circles in walls as black as the poplars in the landlords' gardens and the empty window frames of the caves. All the buildings were abandoned. The Turquoise Mountain must have looked like this after Genghis Khan's attack.

  Six years earlier, two thousand families had lived in Shaidan. Three years ago the Taliban had killed eighty men in the bazaar. A year ago, fresh from dynamiting the giant Buddhas thirty-five kilometers away, they killed one hundred and twenty. Seven months before my arrival, they found the village empty and torched it. Most of the population had fled to refugee camps.

  In Herat many war reporters58 predicted Afghans would hate the American-led assault on the Taliban. They said the Taliban treatment of women, the Taliban's use of Sharia law, and their demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas had not been unpopular in the villages. The Taliban were "no crueller" than the Northern Alliance and had improved security in rural areas. Intervention would simply replace one group of crooks with another and anger Afghans in the process.

  I had indeed found that Tajik and Aimaq communities were not entirely opposed to the Taliban. They agreed that security had been better under the Taliban. Tajik women now wore head scarves in the village and only put on the full-face burqas to visit town, but no one objected to the lack of female education under the Taliban or the imposition of Islamic Sharia law. Seyyed Umar, who had complained the most about them ("They stole donkeys from me"), turned out to have been a Taliban commander.

  But the Hazara I met were delighted the Taliban had gone, and they did not resent the Americans for expelling them. Nowhere in Afghanistan did the cruelty of the Taliban seem so comprehensive or have such an ethnic focus. In a three-day walk from Yakawlang, where the Taliban had executed four hundred, to Shaidan, where eighty shop fronts had been reduced to blackened shells, every Hazara village I saw had been burned. In each settlement, people had been murdered, the flocks driven off, and the orchards razed. Most of the villages were still abandoned.

  The Hazara knew little and cared less about the World Trade Center. But in the short term things had improved for them. They were freer and more secure; they had some power again; and they were pleased with their own provincial governor, Khalili.

  @afghangov.org

  I doubted the new policy makers in Kabul understood much of this. For the last three months, whenever I checked my e-mail at a Nepali town with an Internet café, I had received a message from someone just gone to govern Afghanistan. The UN application forms started passing around in October 2001, and then the circulars appeared: "Please don't expect to write to this e-mail—there is no Internet connection in Kabul." Finally, messages popped up from new addresses—@pak.id, @afghangov.org, @worldbank.org, @un.org—talking about the sun in the mountains. I now had half a dozen friends working in Afghanistan in embassies, think tanks, international development agencies, the United Nations, and the Afghan government, controlling projects worth millions of dollars. A year before, they had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York and Washington.

  Their objective was (to quote the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) "the creation of a centralized, broad-based, multiethnic government committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law." They worked twelve- or fourteen-hour days drafting documents for heavily funded initiatives on "democratization," "enhancing capacity," "gender," "sustainable development," "skills training," or "protection issues." They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, with at least two degrees—often in international law, economics, or development. They came from middle-class backgrounds in Western countries, and in the evenings, they dined with each other and swapped anecdotes about corruption in the government and the incompetence of the United Nations. They rarely drove their SUVs outside Kabul because their security advisers forbade it.

  Some, such as the two political officers in Chaghcharan, were experienced and well informed about conditions in rural Afghanistan. But they were barely fifty out of many thousands. Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women's rights, and fiber-optic cable networks; to talk about transparent, clean, and accountable processes, tolerance, and civil society; and to speak of a people "who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government."

  But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcases? The villagers I had met were mostly illiterate, lived far from electricity or television, and knew very little about the outside world. Versions of Islam; views of ethnicity, government, politics, and the proper methods of dispute resolution (including armed conflict); and the experience of twenty-five years of war differed from region to region. The people of Kamenj understood political power in terms of their feudal lord Haji Mohsin Khan. Ismail Khan in Herat wanted a social order based on Iranian political Islam. Hazara such as Ali hated the idea of centralized government because they associated it with subjugation by other ethnic groups and suffering under the Taliban. Even within a week's walk I had encountered areas where the local Begs had been toppled by Iranian-funded social revolution and others where feudal structures were still in place; areas where the violence had been inflicted by the Taliban and areas where the villagers had inflicted it on one another. These differences between groups were deep, elusive, and difficult to overcome. Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas.

  Policy makers did not have the time, structures, or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural dif
ferences did not exist. They acted as though villagers were interested in all the priorities of international organizations, even when those priorities were mutually contradictory.

  In a seminar in Kabul, I heard Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, say, "Afghans have been fighting for their human rights for twenty-five years. We don't need to tell them what their rights are." Then the head of a major food agency added privately, "Villagers are not interested in human rights. They are like poor people all over the world. All they think about is where their next meal is coming from." To which the head of an Afghan NGO providing counseling responded, "The only thing to know about these people is that they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder."

  The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went much deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about his next meal. He was a peasant farmer and had a better idea than most about where his next meal was coming from. If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan. Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans' diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.59

  ***

  In Ghorak, I asked Ali who should be the president of Afghanistan.

  "Governor Khalili," the room replied in unison.

  "But the Pashtun and the Tajik don't want your Hazara leader as president of Afghanistan," I said. Other Afghans blame Khalili for atrocities in Kabul.

  "Ahmed Shah Masood," coughed the headman, "is the only national figure."

  They all nodded.

  "But he is dead," I muttered.

  They nodded again.

  "Well, then, who? Hamid Karzai, your current leader?"

  "Definitely not ... no ... a Pashtun American puppet...," the headman said.

  "Well, then, who?"

  Silence. It seemed they had never considered the issue. Perhaps they thought it wasn't up to them to choose the president or that Kabul didn't matter.

  "Please eat your meat," said the headman, half seeing the tray of rice and stale bread. There was no meat because the Taliban had taken most of the village flocks. But it was dark and the headman was too ill to notice.

  "Come on," I said, "who should be your leader?"

  "The king...," someone suggested eventually. The others looked a bit uncertain.

  "But he's eighty-five."

  They all nodded.

  "If God was willing there would be no war," added Ali, "but we will in the future fight for many things against other people."

  WHILE THE NOTE LASTS

  On the outskirts of Shaidan we stopped for the night at a large house that had been converted into a military barracks. Babur got his own room in the wrecked compound. I slept on a small floor with thirty Hazara soldiers, most of whom snored. The room was not big enough for us to sleep lengthways. We slept curled so tightly around the person beside us that we couldn't turn over. The man lying next to me introduced himself as Taos of Bamiyan.

  Most of the troops slept in thin American-issue sleeping bags marked "for moderate cold." I wondered whether the American officer from Logistics (Covert Operations) had known that the temperature could sink to minus forty and whether he or she cared. Some of the men wore little wool commando caps or pieces of green webbing hung with empty new water bottles. Many were wearing Norwegian zip-top polo shirts and brown all-in-one felt jumpsuits presumably designed as undergarments.

  I was woken by a migraine and bad diarrhea. I went outside to relieve myself a couple of times, barely conscious of the daylight brightness of the full moon redoubled on the snow, or of the cold. I noticed that the waistband of my trousers was now very loose. Back in the room I tried to record what it was that had once seemed so wonderful about the walk in Afghanistan. I wrote: "A culmination of all walking—the desert—the night sky—the feudal castles standing back—the single lance of the Jam minaret in its narrow valley—the international dimensions of the war—the snow."

  Then I wrote out over three pages every meal I had eaten in the previous month, lingering over days when I'd had boiled eggs. Dawn broke hardly brighter than the full-moon night, with a pale lemon line across the mountains to the east. The others woke complaining about the cold. Despite the press of bodies, ice had formed on our wet clothes. Some pushed through to the kitchen to warm themselves by the dung-fed fire, leaving the rest of us a little space to stretch out.

  Khalife Amir Muhammed of Qarganatu

  Then to my delight we were served tiny, sweet, curled pastries Afghans call basraq or haju. I ate fifteen and everyone laughed because they are considered children's food. As we ate, our host, Khalife Amir, played a tamboura lute made from a small, yellow plastic oil bottle, a table leg, and two wooden awls. He fingered only the lower string. I had not heard music for a month. My days had passed in silences with flurries of thought in a landscape that changed slowly. Note by note the music brought a sense of time back to me. Each pause was charged with anticipation of the next note and the slow revelation of a tune. Khalife Amir measured silence, dividing each minute into a succession of clear notes from the string and then weaving time together again with his tenor voice. The others, who had not been able to hear music performed in public during the years of the Taliban regime, were quiet. I did not understand the words and did not need to. The sadness was clear in the tune and the singer's tone and in the expression of the listeners, as was the beauty shared between us.

  At midday, I stopped at Baraqi, sat on a platform above the road, and ordered tea and cookies. Babur lay in the shade at the base of a wall. He roused himself, leisurely barked at his own echo with a gruff roar, licked his private parts, and then lay down to sleep again. For once, the blue sky was not a sign of cold. The river ran behind a row of poplars. I remembered the sweet pastries for breakfast and enjoyed the warm sun.

  The tea shop's presence meant we were getting closer to Bamiyan and the road head to Kabul. Every three meters along the drystone wall facing us, a stone was painted bright red to indicate a mine on the path. They were antivehicle mines we were too light to trigger, so we walked over them. The antipersonnel mines seemed to be laid just off the road. A month ago a horse had been frightened here, bolted a few steps into the desert, and was killed along with its rider.

  In the early afternoon we left a narrow gorge, passed a hot spring that, like so many in Afghanistan, was only lukewarm, and emerged into the broad, level fields of the Bamiyan valley. As the day became hotter, Babur began to lunge for every strip of shade he could find to lie down in, and I had to keep dragging him to his feet.

  At the edge of the valley, we were absorbed into a rolling line of donkey caravans going to the market. Two small boys in bright blue gum boots and sparkling prayer caps sat atop bundles of thorn-brush kindling piled on donkeys. Beside them walked a young cow, her dull hide loosely draped from sharp hip bones. The cow was a speculation: The family had bought her in a mountain bazaar three days earlier and thought they could double their money by selling her, but in the meantime they could not afford to feed her. A lone man on a mule, slowed from a fast trot, forced his way between the donkeys and cantered ahead of us down the valley road. Behind him were hard-faced men who carried nothing on their donkeys and had come to buy oil and salt.

  We drew level with four donkeys ridden by women wearing faded sky blue burqas, pulled out of cupboards in honor of the trip to town. They had lifted the skirts of their burqas to ride and I could see a baby peering out from the folds of one woman's mauve, scarlet, and purple underclothes. Their men walked beside them, wielding Buzkashi whips. The donkeys jibbed from side to side, easily distracted, heading up slopes toward village houses and bumping into each other, so that the drivers were at a continual trot around their flanks, shoving and pushing them back onto the path. Old men and young women on the donkeys crashed into each other from different angles. One man on foot with an orange hat perched on his curly ginger
hair, a dark face, and brown corduroy shalwar kemis was perpetually sprinting off to capture a donkey that wanted to carry his wife and baby into the neighboring fields.

  The silk and Buddhist scriptures carried into Bamiyan thirteen hundred years before must have arrived amid similar billows of sand and screams of muleteers. Earlier travelers such as Babur or Marco Polo, who moved in long columns of horses and pack animals, must not have seen the landscape for the dust. I was grateful I generally traveled alone.

  The caravans dispersed around the remnants of the bazaar, which was a new kind of ruin—not with solid walls and blackened rafters but with the craters and shattered silhouettes that mark an aerial bombardment. A pale brown sandstone cliff hundreds of feet high rose sheer from the northern edge of a valley broader and more fertile than any I had seen since Herat. Cut into the cliffs to my left were two niches, each two hundred feet tall, with rubble at their bases. For fourteen hundred years, two large Buddhas stood in the niches. But seven months before I reached them, the Taliban dynamited the figures. This valley of Bamiyan, at eight thousand feet, was once the western frontier of the Buddhist world.

  Part Seven

  The Wurduk [tribe of the Pashtun] are all agricultural. They are a quiet sober people.

  —Mountstuart Elphinstone,

  The Kingdom of Kaubul and Its Dependencies, 1815

  Days 30 & 31—Bamiyan

  Day 32—Bamiyan to Kalu

  Day 33—Kalu to Dahan-e-Siar Sang

  Day 34—Dahan-e-Siar Sang to Siahak

  Day 35—Siahak to Maidan Shahr

  Day 36—Maidan Shahr to Kabul

  FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING

  Religions, like camel caravans, seem to avoid mountain passes. Buddhism spread quickly south from Buddha's birthplace in Nepal across the flat Gangetic plain to Sri Lanka. But it took a millennium to reach China and instead of crossing the Himalayas to get there it followed a parabolic curve one and a half thousand kilometers east, five hundred kilometers north, and two and a half thousand kilometers east again.60 The religion eventually stretched to Mongolia and Japan, but in Afghanistan Buddhism filled only a narrow belt that left pagans in the valleys to the east and west in Kailash and in Ghor.