A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  ‘I need some breakfast. Are we supposed to go to the office today? After that flight?’

  Spotting the three of us in the corner, she walked over and held out her hand. ‘I’m Claudia Lucas. He’s James.’ She pointed to a young man in his twenties following three steps behind her. James, whose halo of brown curls suggested something akin to saintliness, smiled shyly, mumbled a hello and promptly disappeared in search of the kitchen.

  ‘We just got here. We came in on Ariana from Istanbul. God, have you ever flown with them? It was disgusting!’

  ‘Yes, I fly on them whenever I go home. They are a little … how do you say … rusty, but they always get you there,’ said Martin, ever the diplomat.

  ‘What do you do here?’ said Claudia, changing topics.

  ‘I am training gastroenterological surgeons,’ said Martin matter-of-factly, as if it was as straightforward as training a plumber.

  ‘I train journalists,’ said Jennifer. Jennifer divided her time between freelance reporting and freelance training. She had come to the Ghan for a short stint with a British NGO training print journalists.

  ‘Me too!’ exclaimed Claudia. The connection seemed to make them, at least in Claudia’s eyes, the best of friends. ‘Well, only here and only as a favour to a friend. James is helping,’ she added, as if media training was a step far below her usual line of work.

  Just as I was wondering which of her friends we had to thank, and before it became my turn to admit to being part of the media-training sorority, James returned with Mohammed by his side.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Mohammed in his slow, ambling English.

  ‘What do you have for breakfast?’ asked Claudia, bypassing the niceties and taking a swipe at a pair of flies that had taken a shine to the luminous mahogany bob.

  ‘Omelette, juice, coffee, tea,’ said Mohammed, nodding his head as he recited by rote.

  ‘Coffee and omelette … and can you do something about these flies?’ said Claudia, waving her denim-clad arms about her head.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mohammed, turning around and walking back to the kitchen. Through the wire-screened window I saw my car arrive and excused myself from the pantomime unfolding in the Karwan Sara’s dining room.

  Claudia took me aside in the Karwan Sara garden the following evening as I was making my way to the dining room. I looked around but the cherubic James was nowhere in sight and I worried that Star Reporter, as she had quickly become known, had been left untethered.

  ‘There’s no power here. How am I supposed to plug in my laptop? And my palm pilot isn’t working.’

  I wasn’t sure if I was being given a statement of fact or being asked for assistance. Power outages were a fact of daily life in the Ghan and I had quickly become used to them. ‘Mmmm …’ I mused. ‘This is Afghanistan.’

  ‘Well, I was here under the Taliban,’ was the curt response.

  Even on my worst Kabul day, I wasn’t sure that providing electricity necessarily made the Taliban a better option. I’d had a long day and wasn’t really in the mood for anyone else’s whining.

  But Claudia was on a roll.

  ‘I’m moving guesthouses, this is ridiculous. I’m moving to the Gandamack.’ She put her hands on her hips.

  The Gandamack Lodge was an expensive guesthouse around the corner from the Karwan Sara. With its faux British colonial ambience, its china tea sets and its collection of nineteenth-century weaponry, it had long been home to Kabul’s media pack – or, rather, those journalists whose organisations could afford its high rent and its very English ‘afternoon tea’.

  ‘That’s expensive,’ was all I could muster, though I was warming to the idea of Claudia relocating at the earliest opportunity. If Star Reporter were at the Gandamack, I’d be able to eat my dinner in peace.

  ‘I’m not paying for it!’ Not stopping for breath, she went on to ask: ‘Hey, can I borrow your radio later? I don’t have one.’

  There are many things I am prepared to sacrifice in my life – hot water, clean sheets, regular electricity – but I never travel without my radio and I wondered how an internationally renowned radio journalist managed to leave home without one. I mumbled that I thought my radio’s batteries may have been flat. It wouldn’t have mattered. Claudia spent the remainder of the evening on the phone to her publisher in New York. There were few landlines in the Ghan and the Karwan Sara’s only decent reception for the country’s fledgling mobile phone service was from the balcony outside my room. I listened to Star Reporter’s voice resonate across the garden until I fell into a deep slumber punctuated by dreams of palm pilots flying over the mud brick walls of the neighbourhood and into the garden of the Gandamack.

  The Gandamack must have been full – or someone had tipped them off – because Miss Claudia remained a reluctant guest of the Karwan Sara. Leaving for work a few days later, I watched her striding across the garden towards the restaurant with Mohammed in tow. It would have been hard to miss her. Claudia was dressed in a shalwar kameez of iridescent lime green, laced with yellow and red beading.

  Mohammed walked half a step behind her, carefully holding a coffee plunger in both hands as if it were a Fabergé egg.

  ‘You only need one large spoonful – you know, like a dessert spoon,’ she said.

  Mohammed nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘I brought it from New York. It’s all I’ve got and the coffee here is disgusting.’

  Another nod.

  ‘Don’t burn it. So, you know, when you pour the hot water in, make sure it’s not too hot.’

  More nodding.

  ‘And take care with the pot. I don’t want it broken.’

  Although Claudia’s voice was loud, I wondered if Mohammed had taken in any of what she had said or whether his mind was on far more important things, like the possibility of spotting Marzia at that afternoon’s tae kwan do class.

  ‘It needs to be ready in ten minutes. My car will be here in half an hour. Half an hour,’ she emphasised as Mohammed nodded sagely.

  The two parted at the kitchen door, Mohammed to the kitchen and Claudia to the dining room to await the onslaught of flies and the result of her instructions.

  In spite of myself, I became quite fond of Star Reporter. She was a smart, sassy and upfront woman who took no rubbish from anyone, particularly the Karwan Sara lads. Claudia took great interest in all that happened around her and had a journalist’s knack of finding out more about people than they wanted to tell. Most of all, while she appeared high maintenance, she had a keen sense of humour and one of her favourite figures of fun was herself.

  The owner of the Karwan Sara was an Afghan who now lived most of the year in London. Hashem returned to Kabul that week and, even without seeing him, you knew there’d been a movement in the force – even the carpets had been washed. Hashem was a rare blend of Afghan manners and Western efficiency. He was an excellent host and an astute businessman, ducking and weaving between the two seemingly contradictory worlds of Afghan and foreigner. In his late forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and deep brown eyes, he was extraordinarily well groomed and cut a distinguished figure whether in his suit or his shalwar kameez. But not even he was ready for Star Reporter.

  After yet another drawn-out telephone conversation with New York the night before, Claudia managed to lose the key to her room. It was getting close to midnight and, unable to raise anyone at Reception, she went to the guardhouse. Annoyed with the lack of service, Claudia gave the guard a generous piece of her mind about the general incompetence of everyone who had ever worked at the guesthouse, the exorbitant prices, the lack of internet, the power problems and on and on. The list was long and detailed, and all too familiar to anyone who had stayed at the Karwan Sara for more than two days.

  The next morning, over Mohammed’s excellent coffee, Claudia told me she had been amazed to find the guard so well dressed and speaking such excellent English. With the coyest of grins, she said she was even more amazed when he had told her he was the owner. She al
so said that she had found her key, which she’d left in the door to her room.

  At the end of their three-week training workshop, Claudia and James held a ‘graduation’ party for their students in the garden of the Karwan Sara. I wasn’t entirely sure how the training had been shared between the two of them. I knew for certain that James had spent little time at the Karwan Sara, leaving for the office early in the morning and returning home late at night. As the trainees prepared to present their work, he darted around among the group, adding finishing touches and adjusting technical equipment.

  It was a mild summer evening as trainers, students and invited guests lounged on the carpets and cushions brought out from the dining room and placed in a circle on the Karwan Sara lawn. The trainees were a small group of men and women who had been brought to Kabul from radio stations around the provinces. Their pieces were short packages about their lives which, much to my delight, included not only sound and dialogue but thoughtfully placed background music.

  The women left early, like Cinderellas, escorted back to their guesthouse before the sun set and their presence among a group of men became culturally inappropriate. Each of the women cried as they bade farewell to Claudia, who was leaving the next morning, thrusting bunches of plastic roses and bottles of perfume into her hands as parting gifts.

  The Karwan Sara was strangely quiet in the wake of Star Reporter’s departure, and its motley crew of guests had once again to turn to each other to provide their evening’s entertainment. Claudia went on to Baghdad, to research her new book and, no doubt, dispense advice on how to make the perfect cup of coffee to bewildered Iraqis.

  12

  A Change in Season

  I’d like to be able to report that Kabul’s expat population sat around at the end of each day and reflected on world peace and the alleviation of poverty and injustice but that would be a long way from the truth. Henk, Mathilde, Jennifer and I spent our quieter moments doing the same things that people the world over did: we opened a beer, we reflected on the day’s events and we gossiped. Also on the list were destinations for the next leave break (very detailed), The End of My Contract and Life After the Ghan (always vague) and, sadly, the state of one’s toilet and one’s activities therein (often highly detailed).

  But in the weeks following my rebirth as Uniform November 43, the number one topic around town switched to security – or, rather, its deterioration. Five staff from Médicins Sans Frontières were killed when their car was ambushed in Badghis province in the country’s north-west. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the three internationals and two Afghans were killed because they were working for ‘the Americans’ (i.e. the Coalition). Badghis was a long way from the Taliban’s heartland in the south-east of the country and, as they claimed responsibility for just about every anti-government incident in the Ghan, this particular claim was impossible to verify.

  Many among Kabul’s international community believed the line between Coalition-delivered assistance and the work of traditional aid agencies (the UN and NGOs) had become blurred in the Ghan and, as a result, the lives of aid workers had been endangered. Coalition assistance came in the form of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, a polite term for military bases, usually American, in provincial centres around the country. PRTs maintained security in their areas and, in an effort to win ‘hearts and minds’, carried out small-scale reconstruction works such as building bridges and schools, which they achieved with varying degrees of success. During my stint in Bamyan the previous summer, the New Zealand army had taken over the Bamyan PRT from the Americans. While the Americans had put on their best smiling faces, they’d done so from the safety of their Humvees. The New Zealanders patrolled Bamyan’s bazaar on foot and had a weekly program on Radio Bamyan about the delights of their often forgotten country.

  Many from Development Inc. regarded the PRTs as just another term for military occupation and, ironically, MSF had been one of the loudest voices of dissent. For many, it was a matter of principle, each ‘side’ should stick to what it did best: the military keeps the peace and the humanitarians hand out the aid. The argument failed to acknowledge that most Afghans knew who the aid workers were and who was military simply by virtue of the fact that one wore a uniform and one didn’t. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the average Afghan really cared which foreigner fixed the bridge on the only road into town – it was a simplistic argument and one that wasn’t popular in Kabul.

  The MSF deaths brought to five the number of foreign aid workers killed in Afghanistan in 2004, all during the time I’d been back. Eight days later, ten Chinese construction workers were killed in a night raid on their compound near Kunduz in the country’s north. Details surrounding their deaths were vague and, as they were neither Westerners nor ‘humanitarians’, there wasn’t the same sense of numbness among the international community as there had been following the MSF deaths. Whichever way you chose to look at it, the truth remained: there had been more foreign deaths in the last few months than there had been in the eleven months since I had first come to the Ghan.

  The growing insecurity in places otherwise deemed safe was starting to affect IRIN’s workplan. Any development project worth its salt must provide a ‘workplan’ to its donor, a detailed timeline of how the donor’s money will be spent over the lifetime of the project, which in our case was two years. Our project’s funding came from within the UN. We reported our activities and, most importantly, our expenditure at regular intervals and, as long as IRIN spent its money as promised, the UN was generally satisfied that we were fulfilling our end of the bargain. The workplan, drawn up six months earlier by my predecessor, had made perfect sense at the time. But things were changing fast in the Ghan and already three provinces that last year had been deemed safe had now jumped the page and taken up residence under the heading ‘maybe – later …’ With the killings in Kunduz, another one bit the dust, at least for now. I was glad I had streamlined the team.

  I had long believed that the ‘real’ Afghanistan lay beyond Kabul, in the tiny mountain villages and small provincial towns where the twenty-first century had made only the barest of incursions. Kabul was an island, one of relative prosperity, and I was keen to get off it. IMPACS (the Institute for Media, Peace and Civil Society), a Canadian NGO, had recently set up a radio station in Herat, a small city in the country’s west not far from the border with Iran. In a bold move, Radio Sahar (Radio Dawn) was staffed entirely by women and offered an alternative to Radio Herat, the government broadcaster. Some of the staff were studying at the journalism faculty at Herat University, so IMPACS had asked IRIN to provide some station-based training for the rest. IRIN was more than happy to oblige and I began to pack my bag for a short fact-finding trip.

  Herat was governed by Ismail Khan, an esteemed former mujahideen who ran his province like a fiefdom. Governors were the ultimate ‘beards’ in the Ghan, the final arbiters of everything from disputes over goats to the placement of new roads. In the time between my discussions with IMPACS and dusting off the overnight bag, a power struggle erupted at Radio Sahar. Like all local disputes, the allegiances were complicated and the details messy. At the women’s request, the governor had intervened, placing armed guards at the gate of the compound. The station was off air and no-one was allowed in until the dispute was settled. After being told that anyone who entered the compound would be shot, I cancelled my trip. There would be no getting out of Kabul anytime soon.

  As if gathering momentum for the long summer ahead, Kabul was now on high alert for a suicide bomber. The streets were empty and everyone was tense. This was the first of the season. The ‘anti-government elements’ lay low in winter, the snow and the ice proving a far more effective deterrent than anything the Coalition could muster, but with the thaw came the Spring Offensive, when the fighting began afresh. To my ear, the Spring Offensive sounded like it belonged with Agincourt, Lone Pine or Gettysburg rather than a seasonal – and bloody – front of the War on Terror.

&
nbsp; The idea of a suicide bomber wandering the streets of Kabul left me cold and confused, and I was starting to understand what the word terror really meant. It meant a fear so basic, a dread so great, that you wanted to climb into the bottom of a dark cupboard, curl up into foetal position and stay there. This was my first such warning. If they’d been issued the previous summer, word had never reached me and I went about my business in blissful ignorance. Now I was worried and I took it very personally. What did a suicide bomber look like? Would he throw himself on the car? Why would he pick our car? What, if anything, could the UN security office do about it? Who could I ask for help? At times like this, what help can anyone give? A suicide bomber was a lottery and I didn’t want the lucky number.

  I felt vulnerable and useless. Not only was I in charge of my own life, as head of the office I was the custodian of the lives of six other people, all of whom had seen and experienced more war and bloodshed than my cosseted Australian upbringing could ever have imagined. Their survival instincts were a thousand times better than mine. I was just a radio trainer, a long way from home and horribly out of my depth.

  The thought of venturing outside the safety of our compound and driving home filled me with dread. The office wasn’t far from the Karwan Sara but the route – past the US embassy, the presidential palace, a US military base and the Iranian embassy – was a labyrinth of narrow roads, wide cars, Humvees and donkey carts, each inching its way forward in the same direction, road rules abandoned as every driver took the advantage for himself. I had never seen a true bottleneck or an impassable gridlock until I came to Kabul. With a suicide bomber on the loose, I didn’t want to see one now.