Hasan’s dilemma was eased by the knowledge that he was out of options. And so far, at least, the American was treating him as a friend. The code of honor that guided the lives of Hasan’s people obligated him to rise to the moment and accept the hospitality without questioning the soldier’s motives.
After all, even though he was here in this partially Westernized city, he was still an Afghan, one of the four great tribes whose lands cover much of what a bunch of Western politicians once decided to call Afghanistan. The local code of law, called Pashtun-wali, has dictated behavior for centuries. It originated with the majority Pushtun (or “Pashtun”) ethnic group, but today dominates the land, regardless of an individual’s tribal identity. All personal conduct and social interaction is guided by these unwritten laws, and they are impressed upon every child as soon as they are able to understand them. The code has successfully bound the tribes of Afghanistan to their common culture, in spite of the distances and separations created by their nomadic wanderings, and it has done so for longer than anyone knows.
And so in Mohammed Hasan’s life, there really were only two kinds of people: those who ascribe to the Pashtun-wali—and the Others. Most of his concept of the Others was based upon the nearly fifteen years spent in bitter guerilla warfare against the invading Soviet Army—that, and a few random encounters with Europeans of one race or another over the years.
Experience had clearly revealed to him that sometimes the Others were honorable, almost as if they had a Pashtun-wali of their own, but just as often the Others could suddenly change their minds and follow some other “law.” This new and different “law” might very well make it all right for them to harm you, or even take your life and the lives of everyone around you. The Others were distinguished by their need to assault you with disrespect and to deal in tricks and lies.
The representatives of the Soviets had used their words for “law” like that, all through the years of their occupation of Afghanistan. That made it easy for the locals to kill them without regret until the Soviet generals finally realized that the tribal people have been successfully fighting off invaders for centuries. Call them the “Soviets,” but Hasan’s years of hardscrabble living in a permanent combat zone had made it plain to him that the real enemy of his homeland was “The Great Russian Bear.” This same Bear had already devoured many of the other sovereign nations in that part of the world, bowling over the land’s people like any sane man would hesitate to do.
The men of Hasan’s province all fought like wild animals who cared nothing for the fear of death, but were who also smart enough to remember that a fighter who dies tomorrow can do more damage than a fighter who dies today. The Pashtun-Wali clearly dictates that the strongest and more fierce opposition possible is the only acceptable reaction when a lethal affront is committed upon one’s family, or worse, one’s homeland, or worse still, one’s sacred religious sites.
The Great Russian Bear had launched staggering and repeated assaults upon all three. They had every reason to believe that victory was their for the taking. They continually captured and tortured a leading officer into declaring a “surrender” of his men, only to find that if the men didn’t like what their commander told them, they might ignore him, or maybe shoot him, or perhaps—as in this case—abandon him to his captors. Thus the Others could never find out who was actually directing the resistance. The Soviet tanks would roll and the Soviet infantry repeatedly crushed entire “armies” of insurgents, only to find that that “army” was actually just an urban militia made up of local men. The estimates of their number were overblown because of the extreme violence employed by these men who were fighting for their mud-brick homes and their little shops in the bazaar and their wives and the children who depended upon them. The Soviets did not doubt that they could eventually win, so they stayed longer than the U.S. was in Viet Nam. Still, the great Soviet Army eventually went away, beaten and licking their wounds.
The Americans, though, they were new to Hasan. He realized that their military had the power to cause any sort of trouble that they wanted to make, so he would have to wait and see whether or not these new pink and brown-skinned strangers were nothing more than different versions of the Others.
* * *
The anonymous Green Beret soldier dropped off the girl and her father for a check-up with a Special Forces medic at the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. It would later be explained that the U.S. Army medic, operating under a back-unit combat situation and with constant terrorist concerns, only agreed to see a civilian father/daughter in the first place because the Green Beret expressed concern that she might be a victim of U.S. operations. The Green Beret, experienced in The Army Way, may have done this knowing that that as soon as a file was created on the girl, it would be much easier to pass her on up the army hospital chain to whatever sort of specialists she needed to see. It was a point of subtlety that did nothing less than make every single event possible that followed down the long and invisible domino chain. Otherwise, the direct approach and “the Army way” would likely have done nothing more than get him a face full of regulations and a quick ejection out the back gate.
By the time the day was over, the father and daughter had already been guaranteed enough medical help to at least address her immediate infections. That treatment alone might require days or even weeks before her underlying injuries could even be addressed, but at least that much was coming their way now.
The cautiously grateful father took his daughter off to secure guest lodgings for a long stay, after the medics made sure that he understood them well enough to return with the girl at the right time and place.
The few dollars quietly pressed into his hands were enough to help Hasan and his daughter stretch their small sum of traveling money, for the moment. And even though ancient Kandahar was not their home, they would not be without resources in that place—every great mosque in Afghanistan has a guest house dedicated to maintaining the custom of hospitality to wanderers, in this land that has always been a crossroads for nomads.
Back on the U.S. base, neither the first soldier to meet them, the first medic to treat the girl, nor the first officer to put out a few quiet inquiries on her behalf had any way of knowing what they were starting. Nobody had enough of her story to form any sort of grand plan out of it. There was only the sight of one girl’s catastrophic injuries, witnessed by common soldiers and military doctors who all know the pain of physical trauma far too well.
Once Hasan and his daughter were taken into the medical system, her father didn’t need to plead for her. The sharp awareness in her eyes contrasted with the ruined state of her body to form a statement that none of the soldiers were willing to ignore. By the time the girl’s story traveled far enough up the food chain to garner some inevitable bureaucratic backlash, an invisible but compelling momentum had already formed around her.
She would need every bit of it; the potential for trouble over her was enormous—not only was it less than five months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, but bombers and cruise missiles were still pounding Afghanistan’s mountain hideouts in search of Osama Bin Laden, chasing shadows through the countryside. Rumors of impending terrorist assaults on Americans and their Middle East bases were suspended in the dust and inhaled with the heat.
For the U.S. forces, reliable knowledge of the enemy’s ways was still in its early stages. Would the extremists be willing to use a child such as this, to gain on-base access to U.S. forces?
And since the Afghani civil record keeping system was nearly nonexistent out in the war-torn provinces, the question had to be asked—was this man who called himself “Mohammed Hasan” really even the dying girl’s father?
The U.S. military policy against allowing their fighting forces to be become bogged down in local humanitarian activities has plenty of justification, because even once the inherent security issues are resolved—assuming that security issues can ever be resolved by occupying forces—there is not onl
y the lack of local infrastructure to house and feed those that the military would help, but every hour expended upon a local civilian would be one less hour available to the very American soldiers for whom those medical facilities exist.
Therefore, even if the giant logistical questions of how to physically care for local civilians could be addressed—assuming that they could ever be addressed in a country the size of the state of Texas, with twenty-five million natives and a poverty stricken economy broken by decades of violent homeland fighting—there would still be the thorny issue of preference.
How are those to be helped initially chosen? Who does the choosing? How would the U.S. Army doctors handle the political fallout when charges of favoritism are inevitably raised by disappointed applicants? How, in short, do you keep from causing more trouble than you are trying to fix in the first place?
Every soldier and military doctor who met Zubaida over the next few weeks knew all of these Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved. None of them needed to be reminded that if somebody up at Central Command got wind of what they were doing and decided to make an issue of it, the soldiers could easily find that CentCom can make permanent trouble for them. They could wind up having accomplished nothing more than jeopardizing their careers while still failing to get the girl’s health into a survivable condition before they were ordered to break off contact with her family.
But the unseen momentum rising up underneath all of those Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved had already grown too strong to hold back.
* * *
Mike Smith was a U.S. Army physician stationed in the capital city of Kabul when he got notice of Zubaida’s case. It was almost immediately after she entered the system in Kandahar. Her files were transmitted to him along with a set of digital photos. What he saw there stopped him in his tracks.
Smith’s official position toward any local medical case was the same as the one constraining the Special Forces soldiers; his primary mission was military in nature—helping to oversee medical services provided for American soldiers whose only purpose in that country was to kill Taliban insurgents and topple their regime. Like the soldiers, he had an obligation to resist any abuse of medical services.
However, this anti-Taliban war was taking place amid the new technology of digital photography and the internet, and it was the photos that convinced him.
He contacted Robert Frame, a U.S. Army colonel who worked in the region to coordinate the activities of the Civil Affairs units that secured the interests of the local civilian population. Frame’s job function straddled the needs of the peaceful local civilians on one hand and the obligation to protect the soldiers under him. For him, the Hasan story raised potential security issues of nightmarish proportion. What if, in attempt to respond humanely to this little girl’s plight, he unintentionally aided a terrorist who could be using an injured girl as a calling card to pass American checkpoints? Was it unreasonable to fear such a thing, he wondered, following the success of the 9/11 hijackers in capitalizing on American openness? The luxury of a purely humanitarian response was something he simply couldn’t indulge.
The Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved with Hasan and his daughter hung over him like knives on threads.
Even so, the photos were more than he could ignore. He booked a trip to Kandahar and brought an able translator to help him interview the pair in person.
It only took one visit. After that, Frame helped balance Mike Smith’s need to maintain consistent medical treatment for Zubaida’s wound infections with the humanitarian side of taking care of the political and logistical realities behind taking two locals into the military system. A large part of his job was to see to it that he did nothing to invoke a backlash of outrage among so many other needy people in that impoverished country.
Quietly, using informal means of communication, word of the Zubaida case reached the State Department in Washington. Officials at Central Command in Florida contacted the state department about this sticky medical/political case.
At the State Department, Michael Gray was coordinating humanitarian relief into Afghanistan and working under General Tommy Franks’s regime when he learned that efforts were being made to find American medical expertise for a local Afghan case. The word was that doctors on the ground in Afghanistan wanted someone in the United States to attempt some sort of heroic intervention on behalf of a girl who had been so horribly burned that her own scars were slowly killing her.
At forty years of age, Gray’s boyish good looks belied the casual ease with which he grasped complex political interests. He was already aware all of the Perfectly Good Reasons that U.S. forces must not to tie up military assets with medical help to local populations, so he realized that the case had to be extraordinary to have landed on his desk. It quickly became clear that certain Americans over there seemed to be willing to take on this girl’s case despite the fact that if anything went wrong, there would be an explosion of negative propaganda for the military, and ultimately for the U.S. government.
All of that was before he got copies of her medical photos. Once he did, it was clear to him that there were dozens of things that could go wrong with a patient as fragile as this one, stranded as she was inside a country hovering dangerously close to tribal anarchy. If she was to survive, she had to be pulled out of the area and placed under extraordinary medical care right away. It appeared to Gray that things had gone too far to be halted at this point, but he knew that if any major politician decided that this case could land on his or her doorstep in a hail of “scandal,” they wouldn’t hesitate to shut down the entire operation.
It didn’t matter. If anyone was going to decide to break the domino chain, Gray already knew that it wasn’t going to be him. At least he had the luxury of knowing that this was precisely the kind of case that his bosses wanted him to pursue. The explosive political and security risk elements were a dangerous and unpredictable part of the picture, but since Gray’s main job was to coordinate the movement of humanitarian goods and services into Afghanistan, he could see the case clearly against the backdrop of lifelong misery that was guaranteed for Zubaida if some form of radical intervention wasn’t created.
He fired up the complex processes of security checks, visas, and the endless signing of sheets of paper that even Afghani desert nomad Mohammed Hasan recognized as a central part of the American way of doing things.
Soon the efforts spread outside of the military and governmental realms. A powerful but nearly secret Non-Government Organization (NGO) agreed to take on the chore of coordinating events in Afghanistan with potential supporters in America. The NGO case workers insisted on anonymity in return for their efforts, keenly aware of the need to avoid the rush on their services that publicity could generate—which would then require them to expend their resources in handling claims instead of actually doing their work. The potential political complexities of the case were so dangerous that the NGO wasn’t entirely sure that this was a case they should pursue in America, but they also agreed that there was no moral or ethical way to turn their back on the process at this point. They could feel the invisible wave carrying Zubaida along, and the dominos in the chain continued to fall, each one toppling the next.
Michael Gray had an additional reason to be glad to see that this case found its way to him—and he would later be one of the people to comment on the happy level of coincidence surrounding this story—because his kid sister Rebecca just happened to be married to surgeon Peter Grossman, who was partnered with his father, surgeon Richard Grossman, at the Grossman Burn Center of Sherman Oaks near Los Angeles, California.
Gray also knew that his sister Rebecca would listen with special interest. “Energy,” Gray said of her with a grin, “has never been a problem for Rebecca.” He knew that if he could interest his sister in this case, she was likely to grab onto it so hard that she would personally see to it that little Zubaida Hasan got to America for treatment—no matter how thick the
bureaucratic red tape might get.
He picked up the phone and called her at home. As soon as the conversation was over, Rebecca called her husband at work and explained the situation to him. Their level of interest was immediate and intense. The energy wave kept right on moving along the domino chain; the reaction they shared was the same as all the other benefactors they would never meet, who by this time numbered in the dozens.
* * *
Mohammed Hasan knew almost nothing of the network of people rapidly developing an interest in his daughter. He continued to bring her in for her ongoing check-ups and he could see that her infected scar tissue had begun clearing up, but he had no clear understanding of what to expect from the Americans.
They seemed so easily baffled by him.
They would speak his native language of Dari through their interpreters, asking him some simple question or other, such as, “When can you bring Zubaida back to Kandahar for another check-up?” But when he promised to return with the full moon, they just looked back at him with empty eyes. Then they made their interpreter speak to him about breaking every single hour into sixty little pieces and then spending each one like a miser with tight fists.
So he followed the Pashtun-wali that dominates the land and which affects all the Afghan tribes, whether they are part of the Pushtun majority or not. He showed them the respect of speaking back to them in their own fashion, with specific days and hours and tight little minutes. That seemed to make the Americans feel better.
He understood that the Americans were talking about taking Zubaida to the United States for special medical treatment. But the translators also told Hasan that this American medical treatment could consume many months—and since there was no way he could leave his large family without him for so long, this meant that his tiny daughter Zubaida could end up living there alone—among the Others.
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