Captain Cat's Diaries

Pieces of Paktia

It’s dusk. Outside the temperature has dropped well below freezing, though a few hours ago the sun’s feeble rays were still giving off a little warmth. For the past hour I have been watching the most spectacular display of colours. Familiar mountains, that at times I have both loved and hated, have turned from pale brown to crimson to purple, and finally ash.

Inside, my young colleague stands in front of me on a prayer mat, facing east. Head bowed and eyes lowered, his lips move, reciting segments of the Koran in reverent whispers. Subhaana ala humma wa bihamdika wa tabaara kasmuka wa ta'aalaa jadduka wa laa ilaaha ghairuk…A'uudhu billaahi minash shaitaan ar-Rajeem … I am lulled into a trance as his words fill the room. Meanwhile the bukhari hisses and crackles quietly to itself, filling the air with warm sweet pine.

---

A few days ago I set off early from Kabul, bracing myself for another journey through Logar where recently, before 8.00 am and before sunset, the Taliban have apparently been stopping and checking vehicles, looking for government and NGO workers. I was assured that they kept to trees’ shadows at all other times, and that we would be fine. Last month, my colleague’s friend was stopped by a group of armed men as he made his way back from Kabul to the Southeast; they rifled through his car, finding only various items bought in preparation for his daughter’s wedding.

Later that day, as a weak sun hauled itself across Gardez’s blue sky, my friend and I discussed my trip up to Paktia’s North. He is from the area and knows this is an unnecessary risk. A recent military campaign in Waziristan has forced Haqqani’s insurgent network up into the Kurram Agency, which borders the district I’ll be staying in.

For some time now, Haqqani and Taliban groups have been trying to force out the Shia Turi tribe from the area. In the past two years, hundreds of people, both Sunni and Shia, have been killed. Some days ago my friend learnt that Paktia and Khost’s Mangal tribe has been asked (reportedly by Pakistan’s not-so-secret-anymore intelligence services) to lead an aggressive anti-Shia surge in exchange for land in the upper Kurram, as well as a monopoly on trade in Parachinar, a bustling market town and Shia stronghold. Driving out the Shias will ensure safe passage for Haqqani’s men through to Kabul.

For the first time I began to get cold feet and felt ashamed for wanting to go on this research trip, for potentially endangering my colleagues, as well as myself. My friend pointed out various areas in the road that are unsafe, and I promised to be careful.

---

As I write I am being watched. A pair of emerald eyes peers out at me from under a faded pink shawl, and as I look up from my notebook, I am dazzled by dimples and a broad smile; then mouth and nose are hastily covered.

From the shadows of this bedroom that I share with five other women, two more young girls are eyeing my every move. Beside me, a grubby-cheeked boy of around three, whose mother repeatedly tells me is “shukh” (naughty), peers over my shoulder. His hair looks like red straw, it has been dyed with henna. I look round at him and give his shirt a tug. He squeals and runs to his sister, hiding his face in her dress.

I have only been here for a few days now, but am overwhelmed by the generosity of these people to a complete stranger, and a foreign one at that. They think I am American, people that many Afghans, particularly in this part of the country, are deeply wary of at best.

You have been told so many times that Afghan hospitality is unrivaled, it has almost become a cliché. Yet here are people with the capacity to welcome into their home -- the most private and sacred of places -- a person they believe is from an enemy-country, and then treat her like a queen.

I am staying in a small village in the foothills of mountains framed by a sweeping clean cold autumn sky. Beside my host’s house, a row of trees swathed in gold and red leaves line a jade river, which gurgles and winds through the fields that surround these traditional mud-brick homes. The beauty of this place is magnified by the silence of the mountains that surround it. It is so peaceful, it’s difficult to imagine fear or war ever reaching these parts.

But we’re only a 20-minute drive from the Pakistani border and even closer to Jani Khel, a no-go area on this side of the tribal frontier, a line hastily drawn by a British officer one day. It is a demarcation that is at the heart of all of Afghanistan’s problems, a number of elders tell me repeatedly over the next few days.

I have been told the village I am staying in is safe. It is also invisible from the district centre’s bustling bazaar, a 10-minute drive away, a place where most of the women in this house have never been, and will never set foot.

For the past two mornings, I have awoken at 5.30 to join the women in their morning task of baking bread.

The bedroom-turned-bakery is small. Toshaks line the walls and there is a narrow bed on the far side covered in a cheap brightly covered Pakistani-made synthetic blanket. A large iron wood-stove takes up most of the space in this room, beside which a young girl crouches.

The room smells deliciously of warm smoky yeast. At this time of the morning it is still dark, but in the red glow of the stove I see beads of sweat on the girl’s face, as she deftly flips a piece of pancake-shaped bread in a pan with a flat stick shaped like a ruler. Then she places a large stone on top of it, so that it cooks faster, creating a hiss of hot air. Her headscarf is pushed back over her head, ready to drop into place at a moment’s notice if a male member of the household enters the room. She looks about fourteen. I learn that she is married and that her husband is in Saudi Arabia. He is one of many young men from the area who migrates there or to the Gulf, as countless families rely on remittances sent from abroad.

As dawn’s silvery light gradually fills the room, I notice how much older than her years she looks, as she leans over to grab another fistful of dough, which she then covers in flour and juggles skilfully from one hand to the other before rolling it out on a wooden board ready to flatten, ready to be flipped into the pan. She must make enough bread to feed an entire household, which in this case numbers around thirty people. I try to remember what I was doing at her age.

“Don’t unhappy with us”, the one boy who speaks any English tells me with a huge smile. He has long eyelashes, like a camel. He is narcoleptic (from what he describes), but he thinks he is being punished by God.

“Don’t unhappy with us", he says again. "We are poor, you see our poor life, but it is good life. We are so happy from you. We are in your service. If you are tired, the bed is in your service”.

My days are filled with green tea, and encounters I hope I will never forget.

I meet a blind mullah in one village, who is gently led by a young boy into the gaudily decorated room where I sit cross-legged on a toshak. The old man’s smile is infectious. He tells me how the Taliban are putting pressure on the local people. He’s unspecific, but says they’re worse than the Americans. As he talks, he eats a banana noisily.

I listen to a group of young boys of no more than twelve or thirteen years old, telling me about the problems in their village. Unemployment is rife, and young educated boys are desperate to find work. It is heartbreaking to listen to these little people carrying the weight of this burden from such a young age. 

I meet the double-chinned director of the district hospital who says he performs hundreds of operations each month, as he is the only qualified surgeon in this area. He tells me that the most common cases he comes across, aside from the exorbitant number of women who die in childbirth, are pulmonary tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and diarrhea. When I ask to be shown around, I wish I hadn’t. I see rooms of unspeakable filth, bed sheets grey with human grime; a glass cabinet in which yellowed kidney and gallbladder stones are displayed in small plastic bags.

I am taken to a stuffy sunlit room, where foul smells cling to the walls. In a bed by a window, a young man from Jani Khel who has been shot in the leg lies looking pale and miserable. The hospital director says he successfully removed the bullet. I am shown a blood bank, which is powered by solar panel. The machine is off. In it, a single bag of viscous scarlet-black is slowly festering.

I meet the director of the only girls’ high school, and the female members of Rabbani’s recently established district-level ‘peace shura’, whose thimble-sized office is in the back courtyard of this run-down place designated for women. As I walk through the school, around fifty girls all dressed in black sit, bent over notebooks. They’re taking an exam, and must sit outside in a grey-stone courtyard where their teacher can keep an eye on them, so that they can’t cheat. The tragic irony is that in the end they will be the ones cheated, confined to compounds, baking bread in spite of diplomas.

For now, they sit hunched and hopeful, immobile faceless figures, like sinister black stone statues in a ghastly rock garden.

I almost throw up when I see the school’s bathroom. Having endured untold fetid facilities throughout years of travel and field trips, I should be hardened to this; yet I can’t bring myself to use this one, and subsequently endure a long painful car journey.

In the evenings, after meals with turbaned elders, I am led by my host to the main house by torchlight to sit in a roomful of women who have been hidden from the world all day (heaven forbid they should be seen) and chat with the matriarch. She is twenty-eight but looks forty. We are able to communicate because she learnt Dari when she was in Kabul; the others speak only Pashtu.

I submit to the young girls’ pleas to henna my hands.  As I wait for worm-like lines of dark brown to seep into my skin and stain the palm of my hand, another girl forces red glass bracelets onto my wrist, and presents me with rings and plastic pearl earrings. 

A lot of giggling takes place under the oppressive yellow light of a single generator-powered bulb; flashes of smiles, mothers’ soothing voices to quiet their overtired young. An old woman with bright red hair and the face of a witch watches me, wordless. Her eyes are hollowed and devoid of expression, and I shudder.

I don’t wash for days and I don’t change my clothes. The closest I come to washing is when a young girl pours ice-cold water from a pewter pot over my hands in the courtyard each morning, and I wipe my face. I haven’t looked in a mirror since I left Kabul, which is refreshing.

I wonder how these women live in this forced communality. Like battery hens; hidden from the world, cooped up in poor lighting. I am silently outraged at their prison-like existence, and want to scream at their men for these lives unlived, faces unseen.

The women ask me not to leave and hug me tightly; the matriarch gives me an imploring look, and I kiss her cheeks. But when I look back to the courtyard from the large wooden door of the compound to wave goodbye before stepping out into the world, they have already vanished.  

From Mali, with love and squalor*

Meanwhile, a long way from Afghanistan, here is a piece I wrote in mid-2012 whilst in Mali. I wasn't able to get it published; so here it is, for what it's worth, on my all-but-defunct blog. 

 

Amita Maiga at the Binke bus terminal, Bamako April 2012

For 78 years Amita Maiga never left her desert hometown. She lived in a small mud house in a quiet neighbourhood on the fringes of Gao, the ancient capital of the Songhai Kingdom, in what is now northern Mali. Her son, an army officer stationed in the country’s capital Bamako, would send his salary to her each month, her sole support since her husband died fifteen years ago.

On March 31 her life was turned upside down. Turbaned rebels thundered into Gao in pick-up trucks, firing shots into the air. They looted the hospital, stealing medicine and equipment, pillaged government buildings and the offices of international organizations, such as the Red Cross, and plundered food stores and granaries.

Amita, a frail, watery-eyed woman, stopped sleeping at night when a neighbour told her they were slitting people’s throats. Though she never witnessed any such thing herself, she saw and heard the men driving around town firing their guns. It was enough to make her pack up her things and leave. She would have fled sooner but had to wait to collect enough for her bus-fare.

Today, after a 48-hour journey across the dry scrublands of the Sahel in temperatures pushing 110 F, Amita has arrived, as have hundreds of others, at one of Bamako’s dusty bus terminals. She sits on a step beside her life’s belongings packed up into a few bundles. Dazed, she watches other passengers bustle past, her mouth partly open, displaying rows of browning teeth. Her skin is wrinkled and paper-thin, drawn across high cheekbones. Exhausted and frightened, she waits for her son to arrive, nervously thumbing a string of prayer beads with long bony fingers.

Amita Maiga is the face of the tumult that is sweeping northern Mali, unleashing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions and stoking fears that the remote, hardscrabble territory could become a new haven for terrorists and traffickers. The original authors of the rebellion, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known by their French acronym, MNLA) are at loggerheads with the Islamic fundamentalists of Ansar Eddine, a smaller group that emerged from the MNLA’s slipstream and wants to impose an austere interpretation of Shar’ia, including corporal punishment, across the south Saharan lands they now control. Labor-rich but cash-poor, the MNLA is struggling to form a transitional government based in Gao. An agreement in principle to merge with Ansar Eddine is foundering on a seemingly intractable disagreement over the role of religion—the MNLA has visions of a secular state with freedom of religion and lifestyle that are diametrically opposed to the fundamentalists’ wishes.

As the two groups wrangle, the MNLA’s refusal to tackle Ansar Eddine militarily is playing into its rival’s hands. Hundreds of its fighters have reportedly defected to Ansar Eddine, whjch, unlike the impecunious MNLA, is flush with cash from its al-Qaeda bedfellows. The close links between the fundamentalists and the terror group’s regional franchise will have al-Qaeda watchers wandering whether a terrorist takeover of Azawad is on the cards, but even if it is, there is little that can be done to combat it. Bamako is in disarray after a coup in March, and promises from Mali’s transitional leaders to restore the country's “territorial integrity” ring hollow.

There are calls from the African Union and former colonial ruler France for a UN-mandated peacekeeping force to re-claim northern Mali from the rebels and prevent the region turning into a “West African Afghanistan.” 

But UN resolutions do not tend to be quick in the making and even if one were established, could a foreign force realistically take on an extremely well-armed militia with financial backing from a global terrorist network in what is one of the world’s harshest landscapes?

In the meantime, life as Amita Maiga and the 300,000 plus other fugitives from northern Mali is seemingly over. For them, there is only a humanitarian crisis that Amnesty International has called the worst in the area for 20 years. Beside the displacement, witnesses, rights groups and the U.N. claim that some members of the armed groups occupying Mali’s desert hinterland have robbed, murdered and raped civilians, and enlisted young boys to their ranks.

“The rebels are raping all the women they see – they come into houses and sometimes take young girls into their cars”, Amita’s bird-like niece Hawa says. The bony shoulders of her small frame show through her hijab.

“Women are being raped – we think it’s the MNLA (the Tuareg-led Azawad National Liberation Movement) – they go into people’s houses and take minors, maybe 12 or 13 year-old girls,” says Aisha ag Maiga (no relation – Maiga is a common Songhai name), another fugitive from the north.

Corinne Dufka, Human Rights Watch’s Senior Researcher for West Africa told Foreign Policy that Malian civilians had endured tremendous suffering since rebels consolidated control over the north. The complex web of rebel groups has created anxiety, she added, and the comprehensive looting of hospitals, schools, and government services had forced thousands to flee their homes. 

According to the latest UN estimates, more than 300,000 people have fled the region since January 2012 as a result of the armed conflict, crossing the sub-Saharan scrublands in overloaded buses to refugee camps in neighbouring countries, mainly Mauritania and Burkina Faso, where relief organizations are distributing basic food items, water and providing medical assistance. Others with relatives in the Malian capital have sought refuge there.

The magnitude of the disaster is highlighted by the fact that a worsening food crisis affecting large swathes of the population has barely received a mention in the media. What the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay described as an impending “devastating” emergency, has undoubtedly contributed to thousands of northern Malians deciding to abandon their homes.

“People’s main problem is hunger”, says Aisha ag Maiga, the young woman from Gao.

“There’s no food; they are destroying our food supplies and granaries. I pray that God will punish them”, says Maya Maiga.

The rebels say they’ve liberated the north for “the happiness of its people”.

The hundreds of people who arrive each day on dusty buses in Bamako tell different stories.

 

New arrivals from Gao. Bamako April 2012

*a borrowed, revised title taken from a J.D.Salinger short story

"There was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man -- and every man who looked like him -- who took the life of his brother. You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place."

Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat.

 

Despatch from the moon

Aerial view of Khost, February 2011

A cold wind has been rattling through Kabul’s trees, where slivers of pale almond blossom are just emerging.  It’s been a long winter, and I’m afraid these buds aren’t going to make it. But tonight the air is as motionless as a lake and a full moon is rising proud and quiet over the city. It has sliced the sky into ivory black, casting long silk shadows of the still-leafless mulberry tree in front of my window.

Last month I flew to Khost for a week, where the day after I arrived a young man blew himself up along with thirteen other people whilst he was waiting for the provincial governor to drive by.  I climbed up onto a roof and watched people fleeing the scene – faceless figures draped in blue shuffled hurriedly along a path through dun fields of sleeping maize, boys on bicycles, a man on a motorbike, patu flapping wildly behind him in dust kicked up by his wheels. Then the reassuring drone of apache helicopters, circling like vultures as masked US soldiers trained their guns on the site. Charred eucalyptus trees smoldered long after the dead had been carried away.

Almost two years ago to the day, I met a Maulawi and reconciled Talib, cousin of Southeastern insurgent commander Jalaluddin Haqqani (see interview here). I want to see him again, to ask how things have been going. He’s looking good and seems younger than I remember, with a full neatly trimmed glossy black beard.

When he was first reconciled, the Maulawi was appointed provincial head of the reconciliation and reintegration programme.

“I hoped I would be able to do a lot for the Afghan people; that I would be given resources to do so. But I wasn’t. Instead the government threatened to cut my salary if I couldn’t bring in Taliban. “We need 30-35 reconciled commanders,” they told me; I said it takes time to talk to people, to convince them. “So bring us shopkeepers with beards” was their response.

It became apparent a few years later that the programme had lacked the political commitment necessary for its success, that it had indeed been woefully under-resourced. It was regretfully acknowledged that opportunities to bring in Taliban commanders had been lost.

Then last June, as growing murmurs of NATO forces pulling out echoed through marble corridors in Washington, the programme was revived amid much publicity, fanfare and funding under a new High Peace Council. But the Maulawi is sceptical and casts doubt on the effectiveness or credibility of a reconciliation drive with members such as Rabbani.

---

Later on during the week, I have the opportunity to drive through Khost’s main bazaar, which is a vibrant place with rows of small shops selling crates of tomatoes, white oblong radishes, shiny black round aubergines, cauliflower, onions and browning bananas imported from Pakistan; in the next stall are thick coils of rope, bright red plastic buckets, kitchen mops and colourful wicker baskets from Zazi Maidan. Further on in a haze of sickly smoke, a man flaps at glowing embers with a cardboard fan and a group of men in shalwar kameezes and skullcaps crowds around the grill waiting for skewers of lamb rolled up in fresh naan. Each stall jostles for space along Khost’s dusty paved streets -- it’s business as usual in one of the country’s most volatile provinces.

We are only a two and a half hour drive from Miram Shah and I am suddenly seized by an absurd sense of invincibility and I want to go there. The urge is a fleeting one, and I remind myself of how painfully foreign I must look in the back of this small white Toyota (which also has a flat rear tyre), and my instincts scream at me once again to stop being a fool and get out of there.

The Maulawi’s successor in Khost’s provincial reconciliation office is a man in his mid-sixties with kind eyes, a white beard and a stripy pale green and grey turban. He sits in a run-down office, the ubiquitous portrait of Karzai towering above him as it does in most government offices across the country. His eyes gleam as he talks and he uses his hands a lot when he speaks, pulling invisible streams of words from his mouth with long brown delicate fingers. I meet him twice, and twice he is embarrassed because he has not brought me a gift, a scarf, which in Pashtun culture is rude, he tells me.

In the blink of an eye you’d have missed them, but in the afternoon’s shadows sitting quietly against the wall are two men, both newly reconciled insurgents, and a young boy. One of the men is in his early twenties, gaunt, dark-skinned and wearing a red skullcap; beside him his youngest brother. The other is a full-bearded older man with a furrowed brow and small bird eyes, who fought under Hekmatyar.

Both decided to leave the insurgency for two reasons. First, because they said they trusted the Head of the provincial commission, and secondly because they were promised jobs and housing and benefits by the government if they surrendered.

That was eight months ago, and they haven’t seen a single Pakistani Rupee.

“I regret joining this process; all of my brothers regret it as well. We have received no assistance from the government, nothing that they promised. We gave up everything in Miram Shah and now we have nothing. Our six families share a single room. Not even animals live the way we do now. We receive threatening calls from Miram Shah, that we will be found and killed and our home attacked”.

The former HIG fighter who once basked in the glory of commanding a battalion of men or driving a Soviet tank has a distant look in his eyes. I ask him what his life is like now. He walks barefoot across the room to refill my glass with steaming insipid yellow tea. “I am afraid that they will come to find me” he says softly.

As we talk and sip tea, the younger man’s brother arrives, wrapped in a patu. He keeps his hair long, jihadi style, and it pokes out of his pakool. He was a more senior commander than his younger brother, and only reconciled a few months ago.

I ask the commander what he does with his days. “The government doesn’t trust anyone who is reconciled, so no one will hire us. My other brother does small jobs, he owns a cart in town and he sometimes does delivery work. He gets calls from Miram Shah from the Taliban and they tell him “look at your life now, pushing carts. What kind of a man are you?”

“I really regret reintegrating with the government, I wish I hadn’t – but if I go back now, the Taliban will kill me”.

We shake hands and I leave them. Miserable, bored and ashamed, they will while away their days wondering how to feed their families, when the Taliban will come for them and why they put their trust in the government. It’s hard not to wonder the same thing.

 

 

The people in between

 

Collective high-level efforts and strategies to rebuild this broken country seem to be as scattered as the fat dust-filled drops of September rain, which the sky threw down last night and did a good job of almost drowning our mulberry trees. The night’s deluge left wailing roots to wallow helplessly in thick viscous pools of clay mud.

This Indian summer rain has brought with it a freshness and the roses in our garden glistened this morning, grubby petals washed clean in the downpour. For a brief moment, they were given a new lease of life under Kabul’s unforgiving dust skies.

Whilst we endlessly debate whether Karzai is friend or foe or fit to lead, and discuss the possibility of peace deals led by men who will probably never have to answer for their own crimes or for the lives they have destroyed; whilst we avidly read news articles in the half-belief that someone, somewhere must surely make a breakthrough about what must be done, the country’s quiet majority will continue to live with their ghosts, hopes for some kind of justice for past abuses vanquished. Dreams will bow their heads in silent resignation, the world will continue to turn.

Kabul’s traffic will continue to infuriate everyone, kites will be flown from rooftops and local imams will call the devoted to prayer and continue to offer divine guidance to hungry souls. We will buy autumn’s giant fire-coloured pomegranates, now jostling for space in the capital’s fruit stalls, to be snapped open with large knives and served red in blue-green ceramic bowls.

Whilst we continue to be consumed and overwhelmed by a country that is not our own, I wonder at the people in our lives each day, drivers, cooks and cleaners, the unspoken folk who make our days so much more comfortable, whilst their own families probably live in cramped houses on the fringes of town. These are the people who time and again make this ragged, shambolic place feel like home.

Here, thousands of miles from our real homes, hours can turn with alarming speed into days, weeks and finally years. Time with our own tribes is lost and this can carve a hole in the pit of your stomach. Daily interactions with people take on huge importance, perhaps as a result of a longing for human closeness.

Every day, a softly spoken young man in our office, whose name I don’t even know, discreetly feeds a scrawny calico cat, which hangs around by the rubbish bins beside our office dining room. He is the only person who does this and for some reason I find this gesture incredibly touching.

The office gardener, a tall thin man who wears a pakool, tends to the flowers and plants with such care and attention and spends hours pruning and watering. From an almost bare patch of land some months ago, he has gently nurtured this arid plot of land back to life and built the most beautiful empire of green, interspersed with dazzling patches of yellow, pink, orange and red flowers; a garden to rival Eden’s. (Kabul is full of secret gardens. Behind the high barbed walls of this city, there is sure to be a carefully tended yard).

A thimble-sized woman with long black braids, soft around the edges with a face round as an apple and skin soft as a peach, comes to our house each day to wash our clothes and clean our kitchen. She has a glass eye and there are wide gaps between her small front teeth, which look as though they have been filed down with an emery board. I don’t understand her Dari accent, and she talks too quickly for me to keep up. Yet for the miles between us and each other’s words that we don’t understand, she hugs me each morning before I leave the house. I love the sensation of wrapping my arms around this small round woman, gently squeezing her soft fat frame, and I feel loved.

Searching for Buddha on Orange Mountain

 
Children in Khost

I read a while ago that archeologists had found the remnants of a large 5^th century reclining Buddha on a hillside on the outskirts of Kabul. Pieces of Afghanistan’s treasure were slowly being uncovered by excavators so eager, they would come to a country that was still in the ravages of a war.

Soft ivory combs and heavy pendants encrusted with garnets and turquoise have been found in tombs dating back to the 1^st century.  Dragons carved from lapis lazuli have been dug up deep from within northern mines, fat incense-carrying gold birds and rusted daggers uncovered alongside them.

The veil of time is being lifted and dried mud removed from Persian, Scythian, Hellenistic and Chinese inspired riches from the Bronze Age to the Kushan Empire, revealing how a myriad of cultures have helped shape this country through the ages.

One hot day just before autumn, somewhere beyond the mountains, a blue faceless crowd assembles outside a house, clasping bouquets of fake sherbet-pink roses wrapped in plastic. A young man wearing dark shades drives past them on a red scooter and three young girls in rainbow headscarves make their way along the same street, laughing. The sound of their excited chatter runs up a crumbling wall and over the back of a miserable dog looking dispassionately through a pile of rubbish festering in the midday heat. Their laughter is carried down the road to where a man squats with his back to them, and on past a fruit stall on wheels, filled with small browning grapes. Then it evaporates.

Two streets away, the Jalaluddin Haqqani mosque sits basking like a lizard on a rock, its blue dome roof glinting in the sun.

Meanwhile indoors, fragments of lives are being shared over cups of tea, punctuated by loud slurping sounds, dark naswar-induced gobs hitting the bottom of a spittoon being passed around, and a languid bluebottle droning vacuously in the heat.

Some days ago, I set out to meet representatives of some of the major tribes in Khost (a province cradled in green, gently rocked by the cadence of crickets, and still defying the onset of autumn). I had the opportunity to chat to female school teachers and university students as well. Each has generously shared their time and stories.

I could tell you about the all-too familiar grievances, about foreign forces and night raids, and how people are adamant that security will not improve as long as corrupt government officials continue to exact bribes and people’s dignity at police check points or over tables in shabby provincial government offices.  About how insurgents menace people at dusk, threatening them for talking to the government and to the international military.

I could dwell on one man’s story in which his son was shot during a night raid and he and his other sons were beaten in front of their wives and children, about how their hands were bound and they were forced to walk barefoot all the way from Sabari district to the provincial centre, at which point they were handed over to the NDS and later to Bagram. About how his children still wake up screaming at night, haunted by memories from the blast that blew down their door on that cold night, and the nightmare that ensued. As he talked, he thumbed a string of well-worn prayer beads.

But you’ve heard it all before, it’s getting old; this record is well and truly broken. Sadly, those who could do something about this are not hearing these stories loudly enough, and don’t see that things might simply be getting worse because people feel powerless and are reeling from the abuse and humiliation at the hands of their captors (or liberators, it’s all the same).

Yet for all the scratches on this particular record, people are desperate to tell their stories. The stern unsmiling burly man sitting beside me this morning from Sabari, who purposefully sat on my side of the room to avoid having to make eye contact with a woman, softened after he’d told me what had happened and I expressed sympathy and said I was sorry about his son, and thanked me for listening.

It’s such a simple thing, to recognize when you’ve hurt someone and to say sorry, to publicly recognise that sometimes you end up arresting innocent people, wrongfully detaining them for months on end. Let people talk and grieve and recount their stories, let them feel they are being heard. These simple acts can’t bring people back or make up for destroyed families and homes; but I believe they are necessary steps and could have an immeasurable impact.

I read this recently, written shortly after the invasion of Iraq. I think it partly holds true here: “Entire tribes feel embarrassed that they supported the invasion, only to be left out in the cold by the coalition's myopic vision of how Iraq should be run. Never, ever underestimate a people's pride, no matter how broken they might be. It is very easy for Iraqis to hate Saddam and resent America for overstaying. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger. Which is why, a Pakistani friend tells me, that what the U.S. needs most in Iraq is a strategy of "dehumiliation and re-dignification."  (Thomas Friedman, The Humiliation Factor, NY Times November 2003).

As I type, our little Soviet era helicopter is bumbling clumsily over clouds and rumpled beds of pale brown; these peaks are about to get a lot colder and will soon be covered in snow.

Instead, I want to tell you about some other interesting things I’ve heard this past week. For example, there are people wandering down echoing provincial government corridors with names that aren’t their own. Back during the Soviet-backed regimes, a certain number of children from each village or manteqa had to attend school. Certain more conservative, land-owning tribes were suspicious of this and did not want to expose their children to something they did not trust, which might get in the way of their Islamic instruction. So they asked people from poorer areas who did not own land, to instead send their children under false names to make up these quotas.  The Zadrans used to pay the Tanis and Zazis, for example,  to send their children to school under false, Zadran names. “I wish our fathers had realized the benefits of education”, a Mandozai elder tells me. “If I had got an education, I would be able to have a discussion with you in your own language”.

This also partly explains why certain districts were more pro-Khalq or pro-Parcham than others, which in turn explains why the Tani tribe in Khost, for example, hold more government positions today, and why other more conservative tribes feel marginalized.

The women I met told me that if the Taliban came back to power, they wouldn’t object to their daughters going to school. “Look at the former (mujaheddin) commanders now; before they opposed us going to school, but now they send their own daughters to the Shamshato camp schools set up by the ICRC. The Taliban might do the same and give some chances to women”. They might. They also might not.

I’m finishing this on a crisp evening in Gardez, in my old office. Beside me are the sweetest people in the world, my friends and former colleagues, who welcomed me back to the Southeast like a sister, and whose gentleness and humour I miss almost every day. It is soul-warming beyond words to know that tucked away in a little pocket of this isolated region, these kind people are here.

Exile and the Kingdom*

Girls from Surobi

 

Last week sometime shortly after dawn, I got into an average looking Corolla with a colleague and one of our office guards, left a still sleepy Kabul behind and drove eastwards.

 

Beyond the Jalalabad road, beyond the police check points at the edge of the city, we drove through hills that glowed orange with the rising sun and wound our way down a narrow gorge, past overturned rusted fuel tankers that hadn’t quite made it down in one piece, and old empty buses left for dead halfway down steep slopes. As we left the capital behind us, the air cleared and the sky turned a deep blue, against which mountain faces towered above us, like the resurrected souls of the dead.

 

It was around 6.30 am when we arrived in Surobi’s already lively bazaar. This is Kabul’s easternmost district, some parts of which are almost completely held by the Taliban. But in these remote parts, the distinction between Taliban and local residents becomes increasingly blurred, as many find sympathy for those they deem brave enough to continue the jihad against a foreign occupying force, whose troops are still referred to as kafirs (infidels).

 

My meeting that morning was with a former Hezb-I Islami commander, who had led hundreds of fighters in Hezbi’s struggle against rival factions and who, for a few years, joined ranks with the Taliban during the 1990s and commanded several hundred men. His father had led hundreds of fighters himself in this same district, in a bitter battle against the Russians during the 1980s. Both father and son were arrested shortly after the Taliban’s downfall in 2001 and sent to prison in Bagram and then to Guantanamo for several years (many from the area believe they were wrongfully detained, allegedly stitched up by rival commanders within Jamiat, who received a lot of US backing following 9/11).

 

After breakfast with our local host, the man who had set up the meeting, we drove out of ‘Sarobi City’ (as the orange banner at the entrance of the small district town centre boasts), narrowly avoiding some chickens and a small child lugging a large plastic container filled with water. On a street corner beside several well stocked fruit and vegetable stalls, a group of young dark faced policemen reclined on office chairs, enjoying the morning sun.

 

Some way out of Surobi, we drove across a narrow bridge not meant for cars, over a fast flowing sand coloured river. On the other side, past traditional village houses of mud and straw, fields of tomatoes and aubergines shimmered in the already fierce morning heat.

 

A group of surly looking young men greeted our car, and after it was established that we were who we said we were and that they were expecting us, we got out to walk the rest of the way to the Commander’s house, along narrow paths and more fields. I had been told that the Commander rarely grants meetings to foreigners; that he agreed to meet a woman was almost unheard of. Yet here I was, courtesy of my colleagues after weeks of skilful diplomatic wrangling, pulling my black headscarf tightly around my face.

 

We came to a compound and were led through a door in a high walled garden filled with roses of every colour imaginable, watched by a group of long bearded elders, also waiting to meet our host. We were told to wait in the visitors’ room on burgundy toshaks lining cool white walls and waited, sipping green tea.

 

The Commander walked in, a large burly man in his mid-forties with a long neatly clipped brown beard, wearing a pakool and shalwar kameez. Everyone stood up to greet him, as did I, though I didn’t make eye contact initially. For the first 20 minutes or so of our meeting we did not look directly at each other; instead we inspected each other carefully when the other was talking.

 

After a while, he relaxed. A plate of watermelon was brought in, some people left the room, and he opened up a little more. We talked about development opportunities in the district, about general insecurity and its causes, and about the behaviour of the international military forces, which has improved but you can’t undo past wrongs. He said the French forces in the area needed to carefully monitor who they awarded construction contracts to, and be extremely vigilant with regards to cross checking information prior to carrying out any operation. Nothing could be achieved, he added, with a corrupt government.

 

After some time, I hesitantly asked about his experiences in prison, afraid to pry. At this point, he became more animated. He said the 20 days or so he spent in Bagram prior to his five year sentence in Guantanamo were by far the worst; here he was treated like an animal and tortured. In Guantanamo, at least there were designated areas for prayer. I asked if this time spent in prison had ever been acknowledged or whether he had ever received any form of apology. He turned away and looked outside at the rose garden. He spent his life defending factories and roads and other important sources of income for his country from the ravages of war, he said; yet instead of being rewarded, the present government punished him. He said today was the first time anyone had come to him and asked about his experiences.

 

It struck me that a number of the people the Government is trying to reach out to in its reconciliation progamme, whether they are former factional commanders or Taliban fighters, must be suffering from some form of trauma. There are so many people out there who have known the humiliation of arrest at the hands of people who didn’t understand or respect their culture, whose dignity was ritually stripped from them through torture or any other means. In a country where honour is one of people’s most valued possessions, many are trying to live with memories of shame and mistreatment. A simple gesture by ISAF, by the Afghan Government, a genuine recognition of suffering and past injustices, an apology or two… I believe these could make the world of difference here.

 

After a couple of hours and in what was one of the most heart warming moments of the entire morning, the Commander asked if I would like to meet his father, who was next door. I was rather excited to meet a man who I knew to be hailed as a hero by many and who had led hundreds if not thousands of men against the Russians two decades earlier. I wondered what he might be like, as I was escorted by a young man to the main house.

 

It was a modest unpainted and sparsely furnished building. Women peered at me from inside one of the rooms and giggled as I walked past. I was led to the main reception area, where the mid-morning sun cast a sickly glow through dirty pastel green curtains.

 

In the corner, an old grey bearded man sat on a bed, frail fingers thumbing prayer beads. His face was a mess of lines and he had small bird eyes. I was told he could no longer walk and that I was the first foreign woman he had ever met. We spoke in Dari, though my paltry knowledge of the language and his lack of teeth made for a short lived conversation about my origins, his health and security in the district. He invited me to stay for tea but I had to leave.

 

Back in the rose garden, the Commander thanked me for coming to talk to him and welcomed me back anytime. I’ve come to learn that people here have many pasts, and one person may give you an entirely different account of the same event, seen from the other side of the fence. Whatever people’s backgrounds, everyone deserves a chance to tell their stories.

 *title taken from a novel of the same name by Albert Camus

Hope for a Great Sea-Change

The mulberries are ripening with every passing minute under June's sun, weighing down the big old mulberry tree in our office courtyard. Sometimes they fall on your head, ruining your headscarf. Otherwise they simply splatter and stain the ground with their indelible juice. The patio is strewn with what look like squashed beetles.

I went to Ireland a few weeks ago, invited by a friend I’d made at the Pathways to Peace conference here in Kabul in April. I visited the centre for peace and reconciliation high up in the wild mossy glens on Dublin’s outskirts, where for years  a small number of people have been working hard to heal wounds and bring people together from both sides of a fence dividing Northern Irish communities. Having been caught up in Afghanistan’s war for so long, I’d forgotten that a silent conflict still permeates people’s lives every day so close to home.

 Church in Belfast

The principal issues at stake in this part of the world were the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the relationship between the mainly-Protestant unionist and mainly-Catholic nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. The Belfast 'Good Friday' agreement in 1998 marked a milestone in ending tensions, but the place is far from free from its troubled past.

As my friend patiently drove me through Belfast’s different neighbourhoods, I felt the tension there and was struck with how divided communities are. ‘How’s the craic?’ he asked. ‘Edgy’, I replied.

In this part of Belfast, homes are covered in murals depicting scenes from the conflict or the different factions' emblems

The wall that divides Belfast

A wall is a stark, imposing silent reminder of how bad things can become. Helpless words of hope written in black marker pens cover the wall from one end to the other. Here, a few months ago, some Afghan parliamentarians came to visit. They left their own mark on this wall, expressing their wishes for a peaceful future.

 
This Afghan war is a complicated affair. It wouldn't all seem so insurmountable if it were simply a case of getting the right people into the same room to talk things over. These endless discussions about bringing in the Taliban and coming up with plans to reconcile insurgents are sounding more hollow by the day. As if by embracing this conciliatory approach and understanding how the Taliban think, some unprecedented breakthrough will finally be made.

The whole war has become mired in messy, underhand economics and war profiteering, which in turn have become entangled in the varying shades of outrage due to years of factional fighting, poverty and in some cases ideological differences. Afghan politicians, government employees, foreign contractors, ‘Taliban’ commanders… Some people have become rich and depend on this war today to maintain certain lifestyles. Where is the incentive to end this? It’s going to take a lot more than sitting in a tent sipping tea to break free from this mess.

If it were simply a case of healing wounds, I’d like to think Seamus Heaney’s words could be of comfort to some. My Irish friend read this beautiful poem at the peace conference in April, and as he read these words (and they were translated) I looked at the faces of my turbaned Khosti friends sitting at the front table, and wondered what they thought about all of this.

The Cure at Troy (excerpt)
Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge,
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

 Old cemetery near Glencree

Peace Jirgas

 Somewhere on the road to Kabul through Logar province
 

I drove through Logar province on my way back from Gardez a couple of weeks ago, where I had gone to see my old friends and retrieve my cat. It felt like going home, but strangely it wasn’t heartbreaking to leave this second time around as it’s so close and I know I’ll be going back there soon enough.

Between you and me, I do not like Logar one little bit. A foreboding heavy atmosphere permeates the place, particularly the stretch of road past Logar’s bustling provincial capital Pul-e-Alam towards Kabul. Everything goes eerily quiet here, and despite Spring’s efforts to bring new life to the place, with trees suddenly erupting in a sea of pale green against an otherwise brownish landscape, I’ll bet the birds don’t even sing on this particular stretch of road.

This area of the province has always been dodgy and is noticeably more conservative than other areas. Rather sinisterly, road signs with the names of districts written in Roman letters have been vandalized, letters sprayed over with black graffiti. This isn’t Logar’s rebellious youth expressing themselves through street art; rather it symbolizes a darker, more sinister protest against foreign presence in the country, demonstrated all too well in 2008 when a car driving four IRC staff was ambushed and gunned down in Kolandar district, killing the Afghan driver and three female Western aid workers.

Pul-e-Alam, Logar’s capital, is different, at least on the surface. Of particular note as you drive through the town, is the bazaar, which is always bustling with people (men that is. I don’t think I have ever seen a woman in Logar).  Dozens of makeshift carts on wheels jostle side by side, brimming with foaming cauliflowers, pyramids of carrots, radishes, mandarines, onions, peppers, potatoes – you name it, Pul-e-Alam’s vegetable and fruit market seems to have it. As you enter the town from the Tira Pass end in the South (where mountains separate Paktia from Logar), large Ministry of Health billboards depicting women (drawings, not photos) getting vaccinations stand proudly as hopeful reminders of modernization creeping into this somewhat conservative province. Giant Roshan and Etisalat posters tower above the townsfolk, who weave their way through the scores of Corollas buzzing up and down the main road. There is street lighting in the provincial capital and the main road is exceptionally well tarmac-ed. This place has changed a lot since I first drove through here in 2004. Progress is being made.

……

Along with the rest of the international community here it seems, I’ve recently been working on the hot topic of the day, reconciliation and reintegration, two terms being bandied about somewhat interchangeably. The organization I am now working for put together a large jirga in Paktia at the beginning of last week, inviting tribal elders from all over Loya Paktia (Khost, Paktia and Paktika). About 300 people turned up, and although I didn’t attend the jirga myself, my colleagues were able to carry out approximately 40 individual interviews among the participants.

Having now gone through all the interviews, and based on everything I’ve been told by people these past eighteen months or so in the Southeast, I would love to say I’m optimistic about this whole thing; but I’m cynical, because once again people’s expectations are going to be raised and then dashed.

Reconciliation in the Southeast is an elusive idea, another project hastily being pushed on people, sponsored by foreigners in order to expedite their own withdrawal, rather than having any genuine commitment to ensuring a long-term sustainable peace. People in this region have always felt left out of any meaningful political process taking place in the country - and whilst most view the idea of reconciliation as a good and necessary one at this juncture, tangible changes to people’s lives will be negligible. Local government is weak and not seen as a legitimate power-brokering body. If this time around (see failed PTS program) the initiative receives the support, resources and political backing it should have had years ago, the problem remains that government is still corrupt and people are still poor and enduring botched military operations. Why should anyone see next month’s ‘peace jirga’ as anything other than an empty gesture, and one which won’t yield any long-term peace dividends or have a positive impact on their lives or the ever-worsening security situation in the region?

I’m in the middle of a three-day conference at the moment, organized by the National Centre for Policy Research. It’s an excellent initiative and the organizers have brought together some great participants. One of them, Sima Samar from the Independent Human Rights Commission, gave a very lucid talk highlighting the importance of trust between the people and the government, without which, she said, there could be no genuine peace process.

Another participant pointed out that political goals are often short-term ones – yet this is precisely what the Americans are looking for now, a political deal so they can withdraw without losing face. It all sounds pretty hollow from here. A representative from Khost province asked angrily what the point of a national jirga was when it wasn’t being honestly pursued and when the Afghan people hadn’t been consulted.

The last day of the conference is tomorrow, but an observation I will make at this point is that of all the speakers, the most eloquent and outspoken advocates for peace, who have repeatedly emphasized the importance of engaging in an honest process of restorative justice and holding perpetrators of past crimes to account (because without justice there can never be peace in Afghanistan, they say), have been female participants. Hearing Afghan women stand up and speak with such determination and confidence is rather awe-inspiring.

I rarely ever saw any Afghan women in Gardez or Khost; that’s not to say there aren’t brave women there ready to stand up and defend their rights, there are - but they are few and far between. Kabul on the other hand is a vibrant place. You get the impression that real change is possible and is happening. The country’s future is in the hands of a new confident generation, and it’s wonderful to witness. I doubt next month’s jirga will be particularly meaningful, but one day, these young people will lead their own peace process, on their terms.

 

Of mice and bureaucrats

I retract that last bit about this place ‘not being so bad’. In what is my temporary accommodation (if God wills it), I have rats the size of small ponies galloping along the inside of my roof every night. Audacious overweight mice waddle about the place, fat from food left out. Last night I watched a mouse lazily eyeing a piece of leftover cake, as I sat on somewhat grimy velvet toshaks trying to get the wireless internet to work in our dimly lit living room. Cockroaches scatter from the kitchen when I walk in. 

Mornings are fun though. Having a shower requires walking outside to a small yard and sticking your arm down a deep and dark pothole to feel about for a tap, which, once located, you have to turn on then run to the house next door where turbaned tribal elders (guests of the Afghan NGO I now work for) are already milling around, in order to switch the water pump on. Once this pot-hole-tap-pump ritual has taken place, you have to sprint back to a small bathroom and strategically position yourself somewhere between the toilet and the sink to catch intermittent violent spurts of dusty smelling water, all the while avoiding getting electrocuted by some live open wires poking out of the water boiler’s plug socket.

However what this place lacks in hygiene, it certainly makes up for in other things. I’ll write about those once I’ve found out what they are, but on the whole life is good.

Moving on to life and death issues of a slightly different nature, I was upset to find out yesterday that instead of applauding the fact that a recent news story has shed light on some further atrocities committed by US Special Forces, my former employer down in the Southeast has been berating and bullying another colleague there for accommodating the journalist who wrote this particular story. Here’s why.

A few weeks ago, this journalist (who happens to be a friend) contacted me, asking if I had seen an ISAF press release,which stated that during the course of a night raid in Gardez, a Special Forces team made a ‘gruesome discovery’ when they came across three women who were bound and gagged and already dead. My friend asked if I knew anything about this, or whether I had more information (as I had been based in Gardez for the past year and a half, he felt I was an appropriate person to ask). He soon decided to head down there himself to investigate the incident further. It very soon transpired that this press release was a lie, as the women were in fact shot by the forces entering the house and left to die from their wounds. You can read about the story here and here.

The fact that this story got a lot of attention in the press, which might add to the pressure already on the military to change the way they conduct these operations, is beside the point, apparently. Information supporting this journalist's investigation was supposedly leaked and the rules of the organization were not observed; some interviews were even held on the compound, shock horror.

I find it sad that some individuals working for an organization, which is ostensibly here to serve the Afghan people, are wasting valuable time trying to find someone to blame for not following protocol – when all this story did was to throw light on yet another botched military operation in which two pregnant women were killed, which the military then tried to cover up. It’s sad to observe otherwise good people getting caught up in the bureaucracy of a large organization, blinded by what they perceive to be some kind of authority vested in them, and unable to recognize when to do the right thing.

Bird watching

Every afternoon at around 5.00, I go to my window and look outside because I have been watching something which happens every day around this time, just before the sky turns pink and spirals of sweet smelling smoke start to appear from mud brick homes.

A man stands on a roof and starts waving a long thin red flag, giving short sharp whistles, followed by long ones. Then he waves his flag again, waits for a while and the whistling resumes.

I thought at first he must be corresponding with another person somewhere close by, but as I watched I realized he was communicating with a flock of birds.

Kabul’s pigeons are light brown in colour with bright black eyes. They are actually probably doves. A group of around ten of them suddenly appears and they begin to circle overhead, diving and soaring for a while, then come back to land beside the man on the roof.

After a few moments he shoos them away with his flag and the whole thing starts again in a frenzy of trained wings and synchronized swoops, until dusk falls and the call to prayers sounds out across rooftops in the cold evening air.

I miss my friends in the Southeast but this place isn’t so bad.