In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Read online

  At the border there are no neat and orderly highway lanes, no agent patrol booths, and no big signs welcoming you to Pakistan. It’s the same at Khost, at Kandahar, and at every other place where the two countries rub shoulders. The border is porous. Anyone, including and especially insurgents, can cross anytime. They never have to explain if they are there for business or for pleasure or—in their case—for jihad.

  At Torkham the border is an ant nest, a big, noisy bazaar, crowded with small shops selling everything you can imagine: sandals, soap, drugs, weapons, and, in the last few years, U.S. Army uniforms. For me, the only thing that distinguished this place from any other border town was the army of small children with their rusty wheelbarrows. Afghan taxi drivers drop their fares off at the Afghanistan side of the bazaar, where the kids would take over, loading suitcases, groceries, chickens, and grandmothers into their wheelbarrows. For a few Afghanis they’d transport the stuff to the other side of the bazaar, just a few yards away in Pakistan, where a Pakistani taxi would wait to take you to your destination.

  Later in my deployment Judy and I would visit an American base under construction at Torkham. We left our Humvees at the base and walked through the bazaar. We stopped at a small eatery that sold chai and pomegranate juice by the cup and chapli kabobs, fat patties of ground beef fried in oil that had been sitting there for weeks, then wrapped in a doughdi. It was the best chapli kabob I’ve ever tasted. I attribute it to all the dirt, dust, and grease that found its way into the oil. I wouldn’t let Judy taste mine, for fear she might be sick for weeks.

  To the displeasure of the coalition forces, weapons dealers and drug smugglers did business in the open here. The American forces had to collaborate with the Afghan government if they wanted to crack down on the smugglers. Here is where this particular CAT I dilemma came into play: When Sherzai wanted to discuss a possible crackdown with Judy, he was hindered by having to communicate through Jawed, for fear that Jawed might tip off his uncle, the chief of the border police, who was rumored to be on the payroll of the smugglers. So they never discussed it.

  Later it came out that Jawed also had relatives in the construction business. When Sherzai discussed projects that required a bid, Jawed would skip that part of the translation. Then, when it came time to start building the clinic, the community center, or the school, only Jawed’s uncles would show up to bid for the job. Judy realized that Jawed scrimped on his translations when it suited his purposes, but she couldn’t bring herself to fire him: He was the only interpreter—CAT I or CAT II—whose English she could understand.

  Jawed may have been sneakier and more unreliable than most, but the presence of even the most upstanding CAT I could be a problem. As the decade wore on, working for the Americans became more and more dangerous for the average Afghan. Even though many meetings with governors and government officials involved nothing more than discussing what the people of the province needed, outside the walls of the governor’s compound, in the street and in the villages, lived the perception that these were top-secret meetings where valuable information was exchanged. No governor or PRT commander wanted to be held responsible for the kidnapping and torture of a CAT I, and so they held their tongues. This is what Sherzai meant when he said “real work.” Not only was I not related to anyone in the province, I was from Portland, Oregon, a place most Afghans had never even heard of. Plus, I slept on the base at night, and never needed to leave there unless I was flying out to return to the United States.

  That night, even though I was exhausted from having been awakened at 4:00 A.M. by the call to prayer, I couldn’t sleep. The window was open, and although there was no breeze, I could smell Jalalabad’s unique earthy scent of night jasmine and citrus flowers. I’d made it through the day without being fired, but I felt no sense of triumph. I got up and looked out the window. Beneath me was the empty swimming pool. The sides cast long shadows on the bottom, beneath a full moon. I stood there for a long time, looking into the empty pool, as if the answer to my restlessness was lurking at the bottom.

  NINETEEN

  Outside Jalalabad a handful of big refugee camps languished on the desert plain that extends into Pakistan. Without plumbing, heat, or electricity, they were bursting with tens of thousands of people who were forced to return to Afghanistan after the settlements where they’d lived for decades in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province were demolished and closed. Most spent their meager savings buying a space in a truck traveling over the Khyber Pass, only to find that once they arrived in Afghanistan they had no place to go. Often, their homes and villages had been destroyed by the Soviets, or the mujahideen, or the Taliban. But just as often, their land had been confiscated by the current government officials.

  Most Pashtun tribal land is passed down from son to son, and has been for centuries. When the Soviets began carpet bombing Afghanistan in 1979 and millions of Afghans were forced to flee to Pakistan, the government was in chaos. No one thought: Before I flee for my life I’d better go to Kabul and see if there is some public office still open for business where I can file the deed to my family’s ancient village, so that when we return I can prove it belongs to me. When the refugees returned to their villages, after the war was over, they assumed they would be able to resume the lives they’d left. Then someone would show up from the governor’s office and say, “Sorry, this isn’t your land.” It cost only a few hundred dollars to forge a genuine-looking deed, and many provincial governors drew them up to claim the most attractive, fertile tracts of land in their province, and would put it under the name of a brother or cousin. The rightful owners couldn’t produce any paperwork, and so the family land was lost.

  One sultry morning a few weeks after I’d arrived, we set out for a refugee camp just after breakfast. It was stuffy inside our Humvee. Even though summer, with its triple-digit-degree days, was waning, it was going to be hot—the soldiers were already sweating.

  Judy liked going on missions to refugee camps because the problems there were easier to solve, hence the visits were known as quick-impact missions. You need some HA, some human aid? Sure, here are some bags of rice, some pencils, and clean, bottled water. Here is a portable mosque. The missions were low-effort but high-impact. I’d learned in Farah that often a PRT’s missions—for better or for worse—were determined not by what needed to be done but by what could, realistically, be done. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the whole of Afghanistan could benefit from reconstruction, but whereas it might take years to rebuild a stretch of road, in an afternoon you could cure a dozen ear infections.

  This camp huddled on a rocky plain near the border. It was crowded, a flat sea of blue U.N.–issued tents. Some families had strung plastic sheets around their tents to create a kind of courtyard; the sheets flapped in the wind, fanning random pieces of garbage. Some people had lived there so long they’d built mud walls around their tents, creating a makeshift compound.

  As soon as we stepped from our Humvees we were swarmed by children—the little boys in dirt-colored shalwar kameez and plastic sandals, tiny girls in dresses of turquoise and lime green, all of them covered in dust. There was dust on the bridges of their nose and the tops of their feet. They were curious about us, but they did not ask us for anything. There were no high-pitched cries of “Pen, mister! Pen, mister!”

  We waded through the crowd of children; I was taken aback, seeing men and women walking together or chatting between their respective tents. I’d been in Afghanistan long enough to have forgotten American street life—the boys and girls at bus stops, men and women strolling arm in arm in broad daylight, a whole constellation of couples and families out and about. The men wore Western jackets, donated by various NGOs, and kicked at the rocks on the clay-hard ground. The women wore scarves carelessly tossed over their hair. Occasionally the wind blew the tattered squares of fabric off their heads and onto their shoulders. There wasn’t a burqa in sight.

  A woman with sharp cheekbones and deeply wrinkled skin sto
od outside her tent and stared at us. Her dress was black-gray, permanently dusty. I called to her in Pashtu, “Hello, adhai, how are you?” The literal translation of adhai is “mother,” but the word is used for older women, such as grandmothers.

  “Oh! You speak Pashtu, daughter. I have so much to talk to you about. Come, sit in my tent. It’s big enough for all of us.” She smiled. She had no teeth.

  The woman eyeballed us: I was wearing my dark-rinse jeans, tennis shoes, and windbreaker, while Judy wore her army fatigues and matching green head scarf peeking out from beneath her helmet. I used to tease Judy about her avid scarf wearing, saying she made me look bad, as an Afghan woman.

  I told Judy that the lady wanted us to come inside. Judy hesitated, calculating the proper behavior. Behind us were six FORCEPRO soldiers. They would have to come with us, even though Pashtunwali forbade any Pashtun female to invite a man who was not a relative into her house. Was this old woman inviting just Judy and me into her tent? Did she understand that the FORCEPRO guys would have to come too? What if Judy declined her invitation altogether? Would that be more insulting than trying to enter the tent with our security? These were the days before the military fully understood how easy it was to offend an Afghan, but Judy knew that even with the best of intentions it was possible to undo months of constructive interactions in a few seconds. She glanced at me again.

  “You sure we won’t be causing a scandal here?”

  “I think we’re all right,” I said.

  That day I learned something I hadn’t known about my father’s people. When you are poor and living in a refugee camp, the rules of Pashtunwali are lax. To practice Pashtunwali to its full extent requires a life of luxury. A woman must enjoy a certain amount of affluence to be shielded from the world. She must live in a walled compound, and have a lot of men to do outside work, to go to the shops, to do the errands. If she wants to go out, her family will have to have a car with curtains on the windows to protect her from prying eyes. There was none of that at the refugee camp. Women coexisted with men however they could. As a result, women in refugee camps, ironically, were among the freest women in Afghanistan.

  As we filed inside, I thought about my own refugee experience. In Peshawar we’d been lucky enough to rent a house. My uncle’s brother-in-law had moved to Peshawar as soon as the war started. He worked for the ANA and was helping with the resettlement. There were tent camps not unlike this one, at the edge of our neighborhood. Our family was relatively affluent, which meant that my mother and aunts were expected to practice a stricter version of Pashtunwali. I was forbidden to go to this part of the settlement because the men and women mingled freely there. My sister and I were driven to school each day in a car with curtains, so no one could catch a glimpse of us.

  Judy and I and our FORCEPRO ducked inside the tent. Judy started when she saw not just five or six children sitting on their haunches on the bare floor but also several goats, a skinny, sad-eyed cow, and a manic-looking chicken furiously pecking at the dirt.

  The woman shooed some of the kids away. Judy and I sat down on the bed. The mattress was thin and lumpy. The soldiers squeezed in behind us. The woman wasn’t apologetic about the crowded conditions of her house. It was what God had decided to give her. She prepared some tea, which she cooked over a small fire in a pit on one side of the tent. The wood was dry; there was little smoke. The children stared at us, as did the livestock. The chicken pecked at the dirt, ignoring the human commotion.

  The woman wanted to discuss a land dispute the camp had with Sherzai. She begged us to tell Sherzai to give them their land back. She didn’t want anything else we had to offer. We could keep our pens and paper, our antibiotics, our sewing classes. She wanted us to convince Sherzai to return the land that rightfully belonged to her children. Her scarf was casually pinned beneath her braid. As she worked, it kept slipping.

  Judy gave the woman her word that she would talk to the governor, and at our next meeting she did. Sherzai said he had no idea what she was talking about. And anyway, he had already given his people plenty of land. True, it was arid and rocky, and even poppies struggled to grow there, but it was something, wasn’t it?

  The soldiers remained standing by the door. The air smelled of dust, animal hide, and milk. Judy took out her notebook and pulled a pen from her front pocket. She began asking the woman questions about her life. The tent flap opened, and three new women squeezed inside. Word had gotten around the camp that the Americans were there, doing the inexplicable things that we do.

  “Do your children go to school?” Judy asked.

  The women all laughed. I felt my heart lean toward them. “We can barely feed them,” said a woman with a faded red scarf draped over her braids, “and you’re asking about school?”

  I glanced back at the FORCEPROs who accompanied Judy and me every time we left the wire. I was used to their passive, businesslike demeanor. This was different. They’d never had to pull security in a refugee’s tent crowded with goats, a chicken, kids, a cow, and a clutch of feisty Afghan women cracking jokes. Their faces looked alive. They were intrigued, interested in where this conversation might go. A goat ambled over and began sniffing at one of the soldiers’ pant legs. The old woman watched as Judy scratched away in her notebook.

  “Put your notebook away. We don’t expect anything from you. We are grateful for what we have. We’re fine, really, as long as you don’t shoot at us.”

  I’d hoped we were going to be served a simple cup of green tea, but our hostess reached for a battered tin pitcher of goat’s milk. It was most likely the family’s milk for the day. Who knew how long it had been sitting there?

  Judy asked quietly, “Should I drink this stuff?”

  “I hate to say it, but you’re going to have to drink a little. In Afghanistan we only serve milk tea to our most honored guests.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “When I get back to the PRT, I can get something from the medic.”

  In the long history of milk tea, that was perhaps the worst pot ever made. I feel confident saying that. It was warm, oversweetened goat milk on the verge of souring. The women seemed pleased to be serving it to us. I felt as if to them I was a representative of the United States, and to Judy and the soldiers, a representative of the Pashtun. So I braced myself and swallowed the tea in several big gulps.

  The old woman must have thought that the speed with which I drank meant I enjoyed it. Before she could offer me more I said, “Adhai, you must have the next cup of tea.”

  “But I only have these two cups,” she said.

  “Take my cup,” I quickly offered.

  “But you are my guest. You know that in our culture we make sure our guests always have everything they want.”

  “In America, which is also part of my culture, we like our hosts to be comfortable, to join us in drinking what we’re drinking. As an American, I want you to join me.”

  Even then it was important not to stay in any one place too long. The more time we spent at the camp, the more dangerous it became for us. In Afghanistan gossip travels like a flash flood. Within moments of our arrival everyone in the camp knew that the Americans had arrived. After a half hour everyone in the surrounding villages knew. In less than an hour’s time every villager who’d been slipped five bucks by an insurgent would have found his benefactor and revealed our whereabouts. We left the camp around noon, promising once again to the old lady that we would bring her request about the land to Sherzai. Walking to the Humvee, I could feel the sun burn the part in my hair. The milk tea bubbled in my stomach. I imagined the sinister brew of a cartoon witch.

  That night in the chow hall I was having dinner with some other CAT II interpreters when I overheard the soldiers at the table behind me talking. There had been an improvised explosive device on the road that we’d taken to the refugee camp. We’d returned via a different route and so had escaped it, but a nine-year-old boy riding his bike home from school had ridden over it. In 2005, this was unusual.<
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  “But no one else died, just a little kid,” said one of the soldiers.

  I spun around. “How can you be so insensitive? Do you really think it doesn’t matter when an Afghan dies? There are local laborers working here, around you, who know enough English to understand what you’re saying. As an American, I’m ashamed of what you just said.”

  The soldier looked over at me, mildly embarrassed. He was nineteen or twenty, and he looked like a little boy to me. He had razor burn on his neck, pimples on his nose.

  “I didn’t mean that, Miriam. I’m not happy a kid died. I meant that none of our friends died. No one we know. Of course I’m sad a kid died. Of course I’m sad.”

  “I understand you’re happy we escaped casualties,” I said. “But anyone dying is horrible. Look at this little boy. He was coming home from school. He was dreaming of a better future and hoping going to school will make it happen. We are here to give him a better life. And now he’s dead. What good are we going to be able to do for him if he is dead?”

  I sounded like I was lecturing, even to myself, but I couldn’t help it. I was fuming, feeling so hurt for the little boy. I am not naïve enough to pretend that in war no one dies, but the news of children dying is always the hardest for me to accept. I remembered being in the middle of falling bombs, running for my own life at an age when I should never have had to worry about the constant threat of death. Every time I heard of a child dying, in addition to the horror anyone feels about a life unjustly ending at a young age, I was also reminded that I easily could have been a child casualty of war, and that I owed a debt to someone or something for being alive today. A debt that I knew I had not paid back.