Human Cargo (45 page)

I went to two more villages before the long journey down through the mountains to Kabul, hearing more stories about babies abandoned along the road to exile, and about men executed by the Taliban; their widows pointed out to me the green flags that mark their violent deaths, standing out bright and clear against the rocky mountains. Then I set off down the rocky track again, past the
wrecks of trucks that had slid over the passes and fallen into the ravines far below, past the valley where a dragon was said to have devoured a daily tribute of maidens until a warrior turned him to stone, a mountain stream flowing for eternity with the tears he weeps of remorse. The road leads down along the stony riverbeds where wild rhubarb grows in profusion, and through the pink and white fields of poppies and the orchards of late-flowering Lebanese apple trees, which are said to produce the sweetest fruit.

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IT SEEMED CLEAR
that Kabul, in the summer of 2003, nineteen months after the arrival of the liberating forces, was still an aid city, the strings pulled by foreign forces and foreign money, protected by the 1,500 men of the peacekeeping forces, more wary after a suicide bomber killed six of them, and ruled over by a fragile government. A great deal was happening, in terms of income-generating and cash-for-work projects, wells dug and mines removed, lawyers and teachers trained, and a new currency floated, but the city has, as Nasir warned, an uncertain air, as if the players are constantly looking over their shoulders. Nasir had spelled out their fears: the departure of the 15,000 American soldiers from their headquarters at Bagram, the dismantling of the UN operation as donors were lured to newer emergencies and able officials were posted to more sensitive trouble spots, the moving away of the now bustling foreign organizations as money and the interest of backers go elsewhere. “No one reads the history books, and no one listens to those who do,” said one weary and seasoned aid worker. “It’s all about quick fixes, and we do those very well. But we don’t stick around for the real work.” Like others, he feared that donors, agencies, the aid organizations with their high salaries, are in danger of overwhelming the fragile Afghan administration, distorting the economy, and losing sight of their most important task, that of building up institutions owned by and accountable to Afghans, while money is being spent almost arbitrarily, more in keeping with funders’ whims and desires for a high profile than in response to what is needed. Though most Afghans now
see themselves as Afghans first—hence the vast numbers coming “home”—this remains a country of some twenty ethnic groups, ruled over by warlords, who like to call themselves commanders and who control their fiefdoms with absolute authority and fill the vacuum left where the state should be.

In the summer of 2003 there were still more than 2,000 UN people in Kabul alone, but there was talk of how there will soon be no more than a few hundred, plans to “downsize” being already far advanced. The young men and women, experts in water and refugee returns and gender studies and security, who are the missionaries of the modern world, are veterans of these campaigns. They knew one another in Kosovo and East Timor and will doubtless meet again in Iraq, the Congo, or wherever the next emergency calls for them. Bustling about Kabul like doctors and nurses, they provide an efficient, cheerful service. They are fit and full of enthusiasm, and they work extremely hard, stopping only on Fridays to exercise in the UN’s new gym, its treadmills and rowing machines flown in not long before from abroad; but they are growing restless. UNHCR’s budget for 2004 has already been set at a quarter less than that for 2003. No one doubts the need for a stable Afghanistan. But the politics are unlikely to allow it. Nor will there be enough money. Somewhere between $14 and $18 billion is needed in the next ten years to put Afghanistan on its feet: $4.5 billion had been promised, rather less than $2 billion delivered. One official told me: “It is not a question of whether we are going to pull out of Afghanistan. It is a question of when. In some senses, you could say that we are pulling out already.” Lakhdar Brahimi, a man widely admired and respected, was already on his way to Baghdad. He leaves behind him, say the skeptics, a tinderbox, with echoes of Vietnam.

Not surprising, then, that the professional Afghans, those who spent their years of exile studying and training in the West, waiting for the day when they would cease to be refugees and would return home to rebuild the new Afghanistan, are hesitating. They feel they have been deceived, explains Nasir, led to expect things that were not there. It is the poor who are coming home. And those who are
being forced home, either expelled by the Iranians, or put onto planes by the British. The latter’s assertion that Afghanistan is now a safe and fit place for return, intended to placate constituents at home, is sending alarming messages to Iran and Pakistan. Both countries have signed temporary agreements that they will force no more refugees home, despite the huge numbers who remain.

Still in search of the internally displaced, trying to find some line of definition in this persistently hazy field, I wanted before I left to visit the camps set up by UNHCR outside Kandahar for the Kuchis, the now herdless and unpopular nomads reported to make up the greatest part of the 300,000 or so IDPs. (That was the number of people estimated by a mission from the European Union early in 2003 to still be adrift within Afghanistan.) But the shooting of the Brazilian delegate in February had proven the roads around Kandahar unsafe; I was taken instead, by local aid workers, to meet a young Afghan social worker called Amira, who had trained in her years of exile in Pakistan and come home to offer her skills to the interim administration. Amira had agreed to take me to visit three women living with their young children in the old city, widows who are, in her book, the truly displaced, the real IDPs, of Afghanistan today. We drove to the old quarter, where once fine houses, with courtyards and porticoes, are now derelict and ruined. Down one alleyway, through what looked like a mine shaft propping up a crumbling roof, up the remnants of a steep flight of stairs, live Anja, Fatima, and Salima, perching in the ruins in squalor and destitution. The three women have known one another for a long time. They come from the same village in the highlands of the Hindu Kush, not far from Bamiyan. Anja is in her early sixties, and the two younger women barely in their thirties, but all three look considerably older. Fatima’s face is thickly lined and Salima is thin and listless. They are widows, their husbands killed at different times in the fighting, when the Taliban came to their valley and laid waste to their homes and fields. Together with nine children under the age of fifteen, they occupy two dark rooms. The smell of feces and rubbish is overpowering.

On one wall in the room Anja and Fatima share with Fatima’s
two young daughters, hung high up as is the style in Afghanistan, is a single photograph of a young, scholarly-looking man, in spectacles and city clothes. Though there is very little light, the picture stands out, for there is almost nothing else in the room, beyond a neat pile of mats and quilts in one corner, and two burqas hanging on a peg. “That is my son,” said Anja. “He was called Husein. When the Taliban attacked the mujahedeen in our village, he was caught in the crossfire. There was a bullet in his neck and another in his kidneys. He had been in Iran as a refugee, but we were all here in Kabul, because we couldn’t afford to get to Iran, and he had gone back to the village to see what the situation was. We hadn’t seen him for many months.” Fatima is Anja’s daughter-in-law. Too poor to make the journey into exile during the civil war, they are now too poor to go home to their valley; in any case, as women alone with small children, they do not feel able to reclaim the lands that were once theirs. Their houses have been destroyed in the fighting, the rafters stolen for firewood, their fields long since claimed by others, and they are skeptical that they would receive any of the international help promised by foreign donors to people going home.

Salima’s husband, Mustafa, was the first of the three women’s husbands to die. Five years ago, when the Taliban attacked their village, the family was preparing to flee to safety with other villagers when a stray bullet caught him as he was carrying a first load of belongings out of their house. “There was no hospital to take him to,” she said. “I simply held him in my arms and he died. We just sat there staring at him, because we couldn’t believe it: one moment he was alive, and then he was dead.” Because she stayed behind to bury him, Salima and her seven children were forced to make the journey to safety alone, the other villagers having already left. “We were the last to leave. The village was deserted. It took us a week to get to Kabul, sleeping out in the mountains, and I had to carry my youngest child on my back. We left behind us a good and happy life. We were all farmers, and we grew potatoes, barley, beans, wheat, cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes. We had apple and apricot trees. We managed well.”

When Salima and her children got to Kabul, in 1998, she found work doing washing for the more prosperous families, and began spinning and sewing quilts, skills she had used for the family at home. She found a room in the same building as Anja and Fatima. “Kabul was very empty then, and there was no landlord. We simply moved in and cleaned it up a bit and lived here. But when the Americans came and the landlord came back, he told us that we would have to pay ten dollars a month for each room and now I wonder every month how to pay the rent.” Salima’s rent bought her a single room, some fifteen feet square, which she shares with her seven children. It has a cement floor and a wooden ceiling, a window with glass looking out over the derelict courtyard, the use of an open latrine, and a small extra area she uses as a kitchen. Her eldest son, who is fourteen, sells soap and shampoo in the bazaar, but in recent months demands by police for bribes have reduced his profit to nothing. Other than the little Salima makes from her sewing, the family has no income. I asked her what they eat. “For breakfast and lunch, we have bread, and sometimes a little tea. For dinner, I cook potatoes and sometimes the cheapest rice. Sometimes I have to buy the food already cooked because it is very hard to find fuel. The children search for pieces of paper or cardboard, or old shoes, to use as fuel.” At night, a very small kerosene lamp gives them a few hours of light.

The children, said the three women, are healthy, and some of them at least are now going to school. The women do not look well. Rheumatism from the damp and cold, TB, scabies, gastritis, and kidney problems from the polluted water and poor diet have hit the returning refugees hard. Anja has constant toothaches in her few remaining teeth, and Fatima suffers from recurrent bouts of untreated malaria. Anja and Fatima cry when they talk about Husein, saying that he would have looked after them, and that they had pinned all their hopes on him. “If he had lived,” they said, “we would have gone home. We would have been all right.” While the Taliban were still in power, Fatima traveled back to the village to find Husein’s grave. But there was still fighting in the neighborhood and she had
to flee back to Kabul without seeing where he was buried. She has not been back since. Her misfortune now, she says, is that she had two daughters and no sons: with no male figure to look after them, what future would they have?

Afghanistan, said Amira as we left, has become a country of displacement, people drifting from one end of the land to the other, in search of safety or food. Half the population no longer lives in the place they once knew as home. The European Union plan, drawn up to monitor the returning refugees, spoke of a people coming home “in safety and dignity.” The Belgian branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, which has opened a first clinic for mental health problems, has been overwhelmed by cases of anxiety and depression, men and women shocked and traumatized by events they were forced to witness, by loss and death, and by the utter desolation of the life they are enduring now.

I asked Amira whom she considered to be worse off in the new Afghanistan, the families who had had the resources to flee abroad during the years of fighting, or those who, like the three widows, could not find the money to reach the borders. She looked surprised. “Kabul is full of displaced people like these women. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of women just like Anja and Fatima and Salima, in cities all over the country. Unlike the refugees, who are coining back with new skills and languages and education and even possessions, they have nothing to offer. They have lost everything—husbands, lands, homes. They are entitled to nothing and they have nothing. What little money they manage to earn all goes in food for the children. It is hard to see how they will survive.” It is hard, too, in Afghanistan, to see where the internally displaced end and the urban poor begin; indeed, the distinction is increasingly allowed to blur among those who work with them, who say that the ever growing numbers of people displaced by extreme poverty and moving to the big cities are now indistinguishable from the beggars and squatters who have long filled the capital.

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BEFORE LEAVING KABUL,
I went to visit Babur’s tomb, fabled like all his settings as a place of greenery and peace. The greatest and most civilized of all the humane Islamic travelers and geographers, having conquered Delhi and founded the Moghul dynasty, Babur asked to be buried in Kabul, saying he liked its gardens of shady trees and the cool of its summer months. Babur’s last wife was an Afghan; after her husband’s death, she brought his body home, and in 1640 his grandson Shah Jahan built him a tomb on the hillside above the city, looking out across the river, under mulberry and plane trees. Babur wanted his tomb left open to the winds, but sometime later a memorial pavilion was erected to protect the site, left open on three sides, carved in small delicate panels of pink, green, and black marble. The writer Peter Levi, who visited Babur’s tomb in 1972, had expected to find the place in ruins. Instead all was tranquillity and elegance, the gardens stretching away in formal parterres, with fountains of bubbling water and the avenues of mulberries the philosopher warrior had so loved.