The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2 page)

Some staffed foreign NGOs, often in the area of women's health, which organizations the Taliban permitted to continue. Doctors could still work. And so could women who helped other women to learn basic hygiene and sanitation practices. Some taught in underground schools, leading courses for girls and women in everything from Microsoft Windows to math and Dari, as well as the Holy Q'uran. These study sessions took place across Kabul in private homes or, even better, in women's hospitals, the one safe zone the Taliban permitted. But the women could never fully let their guard down; classes would pack up at a moment's notice after someone came running down a hallway to warn that the Taliban were coming. Still others, like Kamila, launched home businesses and risked their safety to find buyers for the goods they produced. Though their vocations differed, these women shared one thing in common: their work meant the difference between survival and starvation for their families. And they did it on their own.

No one had fully told these heroines' stories. There were moving diaries that captured the brutality and despair of women's lives under the Taliban, and inspiring books about women who created new opportunities after the Taliban had been forced into retreat. But this story was different: it was about Afghan women who supported one another when the world outside had forgotten them. They helped themselves and their communities with no help from beyond their poor and broken country, and they reshaped their own future in the process.

Kamila is one of these young women, and if you judge by the enduring impact her work has had on modern-day Afghanistan, it's fair to say that she's among the most visionary. Her story tells us much about the country to which we continue to send our troops nearly a decade after the Taliban's foot soldiers stopped patrolling the streets outside her front door. And it offers a guide as we watch to see whether the past decade of modest progress will turn out to have been a new beginning for Afghan women or an aberration that disappears when the foreigners do.

Deciding to write about Kamila was easy. Actually doing so was not. Security went to pieces during the years I spent interviewing Kamila's family, friends, and colleagues. Suicide bombings and rocket attacks terrorized the city with increasing frequency--and potency. Eventually these grew sophisticated and coordinated enough to pin Kabulis down in their homes and offices for hours at a time. Even the usually stoic Mohamad occasionally showed his nervousness, bringing me his wife's black Iranian-style headscarf to help me look more “local.” After each incident I would call my husband to say that everything was okay, and urge him not to pay too much attention to all the bad news in his “Afghanistan” Google Alert. Meanwhile, all across Kabul cement walls rose higher and the barbed wire surrounding them grew thicker. I and everyone else in Kabul learned to live with heavily armed guards and multiple security searches each time we entered a building. Thugs and insurgents began kidnapping foreign journalists and aid workers from their homes and cars, sometimes for cash and sometimes for politics. Journalist friends and I spent hours trading rumors we had heard of attacks and potential attacks, and texting one another when security alerts warned of neighborhoods we should avoid that day. One afternoon following an intense day of interviews I received a worried call from the U.S. Embassy asking if I was the American writer who had been abducted the day before. I assured them I was not.

This worsening reality complicated my work. Afghan girls who worked with Kamila during the Taliban era grew more nervous about meeting with me for fear that their families or bosses would shun the attention a foreigner's visit attracted. Others frightened of being overheard by their colleagues refused entirely. “Don't you know the Taliban are coming back?” one young woman asked me in a nervous whisper. She worked for the United Nations at the time, but had just been telling me all about the NGO she worked for during the Taliban. “They hear everything,” she said, “and if my husband finds out I talked to you, he will divorce me.”

I didn't know how to answer such questions but did everything I could to protect my interview subjects and myself: I dressed even more conservatively than the Afghan women around me; wore my own headscarves, which I had bought at an Islamic clothing store in Anaheim, California; and learned to speak Dari. When I arrived at stores and offices for interviews, I stayed silent for as long as possible and let Mohamad speak to the security guards and receptionists on my behalf. I knew that the better I blended in, the safer we all would be.

One of my reporting trips coincided with an audacious early morning attack on a UN guesthouse that killed five UN workers. For many nights afterward I would jump out of bed and leap into my slippers whenever I heard the neighbor's cat walking across the plastic sheeting that insulated our roof--I thought the noise was someone trying to break in. A friend suggested, only half jokingly, that I keep an AK-47 in my room to defend our house against would-be attackers. I agreed immediately, but my roommates worried that, given my limited firearms experience, this would create more danger than it prevented.

Kamila and her sisters also feared for my safety.

“Aren't you worried? What does your family say?” Kamila's older sister Malika asked. “It is very dangerous here for foreigners right now.”

I reminded them all that they had lived through much worse and had never stopped working. Why should I? They tried to protest, but they knew I was right: they had kept going during the Taliban years despite the risks, not just because they had to but because they believed in what they were doing. So did I.

The fact that I stayed in Kabul then--and kept coming back year after year--earned me their respect and strengthened our friendship. And the more I learned about Kamila's family--their commitment to service and education, their desire to make a difference for their country--the more my esteem for them grew. I strove to be worthy of their example.

Over time Kamila's family became part of mine. One of her sisters would help me with my Dari while another made delicious traditional Afghan dinners of rice, cauliflower, and potatoes for her vegetarian guest from America. When I left in the evenings, they always insisted on checking to make sure my car was outside before letting me put my shoes on to leave. We spent afternoons sitting in our stocking feet in the living room drinking tea and snacking on toot, dried berries from the north. When we weren't working we swapped stories about husbands and politics and the “situation,” as everyone in Kabul euphemistically referred to security. We sang and danced with Kamila's beautiful toddler nieces. And we worried about one another.

What I found in Kabul was a sisterhood unlike any I had seen before, marked by empathy, laughter, courage, curiosity about the world, and above all a passion for work. I saw it the first day I met Kamila: here was a young woman who believed with all her heart that by starting her own business and helping other women to do the same, she could help save her long-troubled country. The journalist in me needed to know: where does such a passion, such a calling, come from? And what does Kamila's story tell us about Afghanistan's future and America's involvement in it?

That is the story I set out to tell. And those are the questions I set out to answer.

The News Arrives and Everything Changes

“Kamila Jan, I'm honored to present you with your certificate.”

The small man with graying hair and deeply set wrinkles spoke with pride as he handed the young woman an official-looking document. Kamila took the paper and read:

This is to certify that Kamila Sidiqi has successfully completed her studies at Sayed Jamaluddin Teacher Training Institute.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN

SEPTEMBER 1996

“Thank you, Agha,” Kamila said. A snow-melting smile broke out across her face. She was the second woman in her family to finish Sayed Jamaluddin's two-year course; her older sister Malika had graduated a few years earlier and was now teaching high school in Kabul. Malika, however, had not had the constant shellings and rocket fire of the civil war to contend with as she traveled back and forth to class.

Kamila clasped the treasured document. Her headscarf hung casually and occasionally slipped backward to reveal a few strands of her shoulder-length wavy brown hair. Wide-legged black pants and dark, pointy low heels peeked out from under the hem of her floor-length coat. Kabul's women were known for stretching the sartorial limits of their traditional country, and Kamila was no exception. Until the leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance, the Mujahideen (“holy warriors”), unseated the Moscow-backed government of Dr. Najibullah in 1992, many Kabuli women traveled the cosmopolitan capital in Western clothing, their heads uncovered. But now, only four years later, the Mujahideen defined women's public space and attire far more narrowly, mandating offices separate from men, headscarves, and baggy, modest clothing. Kabul's women, young and old, dressed accordingly, though many--like Kamila--enlivened the rules by tucking a smart pair of shoes under their shapeless black jackets.

It was a far cry from the 1950s and '60s, when fashionable Afghan women glided through the urbane capital in European-style skirt suits and smart matching headscarves. By the 1970s, Kabul University students shocked their more conservative rural countrymen with knee-skimming miniskirts and stylish pumps. Campus protests and political turmoil marked those years of upheaval. But that was all well before Kamila's time: she had been born only two years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, an occupation that gave rise to a decade-long battle of Afghan resistance waged by the Mujahideen, whose forces ultimately bled the Russians dry. Nearly two decades after the first Russian tank rolled into Afghanistan, Kamila and her friends had yet to experience peace. After the defeated Soviets withdrew the last of their support for the country in 1992, the triumphant Mujahideen commanders began fighting among themselves for control of Kabul. The brutality of the civil war shocked the people of Kabul. Overnight, neighborhood streets turned into frontline positions between competing factions who shot at one another from close range.

Despite the civil war, Kamila's family and tens of thousands of other Kabulis went to school and work as often as they could, even while most of their friends and family fled to safety in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. With her new teaching certificate in hand, Kamila would soon begin her studies at Kabul Pedagogical Institute, a coed university founded in the early 1980s during the Soviet years of educational reform, which saw the expansion of state institutions. After two years, she would earn a bachelor's degree and begin her teaching career there in Kabul. She hoped to become a professor of Dari or perhaps even literature one day.

Yet despite the years of hard work and her optimistic plans for the future, no joyful commencement ceremony would honor Kamila's great achievement. The civil war had disemboweled the capital's stately architecture and middle-class neighborhoods, transforming the city into a collapsed mess of gutted roads, broken water systems, and crumbling buildings. Rockets launched by warring commanders regularly arced across Kabul's horizon, falling onto the capital's streets and killing its residents indiscriminately. Everyday events like graduations had become too dangerous to even contemplate, let alone attend.

Kamila placed the neatly printed certificate into a sturdy brown folder and stepped out of the administrator's office, leaving behind a line of young women who were waiting to receive their diplomas. Walking through a narrow corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Sayed Jamaluddin's main entrance, she passed two women who were absorbed in conversation in the crowded hallway. She couldn't help overhearing them.

“I hear they are coming today,” the first woman said to her friend.

“My cousin told me they are just outside Kabul,” the other answered in a whisper.

Kamila immediately knew who “they” were: the Taliban, whose arrival now felt utterly inevitable. News in the capital traveled at an astoundingly rapid pace via a far-reaching network of extended families that connected the provinces across Afghanistan. Rumors of the arriving regime were rampant, and the word was out that women were in the crosshairs. The harder-to-control, more remote rural regions could sometimes carve out exceptions for their young women, but the Taliban moved quickly to consolidate power in the urban areas. So far they had won every battle.

Kamila stood quietly in the hallway of the school she had fought so hard to attend, despite all the dangers, and listened to her classmates with a feeling of growing unease. She moved closer so she could hear the girls' conversation more clearly.

“You know they shut the schools for girls in Herat,” the sharp-nosed brunette said. Her voice was heavy with worry. The Taliban had captured the western city a year earlier. “My sister heard that women can't even leave the house once they take over. And here we thought we had lived through the worst.”

“Come, it might not be so bad,” answered her friend, taking her hand. “They might actually bring some peace with them, God willing.”

Holding her folder tightly with both hands, Kamila hurried downstairs for the long bus ride that would take her to her family's home in the neighborhood of Khair Khana. Only a few months ago she had walked the seven miles after a rocket had landed along the road in Karteh Char, the neighborhood where her school was located, damaging the roof of a hospital for government security forces and knocking out the city's bus service for the entire evening.

Everyone in Kabul had grown accustomed to seeking safety between doorjambs or in basements once they heard the now-familiar shriek of approaching rockets. A year earlier the teacher training institute had moved its classes from Karteh Char, which was regularly pummeled by rocket attacks and mortar fire, to what its director hoped was a safer location in a once-elegant French high school downtown. Not long afterward yet another rocket, this one targeting the nearby Ministry of Interior, landed directly in front of the school's new home.

All these memories raced through Kamila's mind as she boarded the rusty light blue “Millie” bus that was once part of the government-run service and settled into her seat. She leaned against the large mud-flecked window and listened to the women around her while the bus began to maneuver bumpily through Karteh Char's torn-up streets. Everyone had her version of what the new regime would mean for Kabul's residents.

“Maybe they will bring security,” said a girl who sat a few rows behind Kamila.

“I don't think so,” her friend answered. “I heard on the radio that they don't allow school or anything once they come. No jobs, either. We won't even be able to leave the house unless they say so. Perhaps they will only be here for a few months . . .”

Kamila gazed through the window and tried to tune out the conversations around her. She knew the girl was probably right, but she couldn't bear to think about what it would mean for her and her four younger sisters still living at home. She watched as shopkeepers on the city's dusty streets engaged in the daily routine of closing their grocery stores, photo shops, and bakery stalls. Over the past four years the entrances to Kabul's shops had become a barometer of the day's violence: doors that were wide open meant daily life pushed forward, even if occasionally punctured by the ring of distant rocket fire. But when they were shut in broad daylight, Kabulis knew danger waited nearby and that they, too, would be best served by remaining indoors.

The old bus lurched forward amid a belch of exhaust and finally arrived at Kamila's stop. Khair Khana, a northern suburb of Kabul, was home to a large community of Tajiks, Afghanistan's second-largest ethnic group. Like most Tajik families, Kamila's parents came from the north of the country. The south was traditionally Pashtun terrain. Kamila's father had moved the family to Khair Khana during his last tour of duty as a senior military officer for the Afghan army, in which he had served his country for more than three decades. Kabul, he thought at the time, offered his nine girls the best chance of a good education. And education, he believed, was critical to his children's, his family's, and his country's future.

Kamila hurriedly made her way down the dusty street, holding her scarf over her mouth to keep from inhaling the city's gritty soot. She passed the narrow grocery store fronts and wooden vegetable carts where peddlers sold carrots and potatoes. Smiling, flower-laden brides and grooms stared down at her from a series of wedding pictures that hung from the wall of a photo shop. From the bakery came the delicious smell of fresh naan bread, followed by a butcher shop where large hunks of dark red meat dangled from steel hooks. As she walked Kamila overheard two shopkeepers trading stories of the day. Like all Kabulis who remained in the capital, these men had grown accustomed to watching regimes come and go, and they were quick to sense an impending collapse. The first, a short man with balding hair and deeply set wrinkles, was saying that his cousin had told him Massoud's forces were loading up their trucks and fleeing the capital. The other man shook his head in disbelief.

“We will see what comes next,” he said. “Maybe things will get better, Inshallah. But I doubt it.”

Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud was the country's defense minister and a Tajik military hero from the Panjshir Valley, not far from Parwan, where Kamila's family came from. During the years of resistance against the Russians, Dr. Najibullah's forces had imprisoned Kamila's father on suspicion of supporting Massoud, who was known as the “Lion of Panjshir” and was among the most famous of the Mujahideen fighters. After the Russians withdrew in 1992, Mr. Sidiqi was freed by forces loyal to Massoud, who was now serving in President Burhanuddin Rabbani's new government. Mr. Sidiqi went to work with Massoud's soldiers in the north for a while, eventually deciding on retirement in Parwan, his boyhood home and a place he loved more than any other in the world.

All through the preceding summer of 1996, Massoud had vowed to stop the Taliban's offensive even as the relentless bombardment of the capital continued and Taliban forces took one city after another. If the government soldiers were really packing up and heading out of Kabul, Kamila thought, the Taliban could not be far behind. She picked up her pace and kept her eyes on the ground. No need to look for trouble. As she approached her green metal gate on the corner of Khair Khana's well-trafficked main road, she sighed in relief. She had never been more grateful to live so close to the bus stop.

The wide green door clanged shut behind Kamila, and her mother, Ruhasva, rushed out into the small courtyard to embrace her daughter. She was a tiny woman with wisps of white hair that framed a kindly, round face. She kissed Kamila on both cheeks and pressed her close. Mrs. Sidiqi had heard the rumors of the Taliban's arrival all morning long, and had been pacing her living room floor for two hours, anxious for her daughter's safety.

Finally home, with her family close and darkness falling, Kamila settled down on a velvety pillow in her living room. She picked up one of her favorite books, a frayed collection of poems, and lit a hurricane lamp with one of the small red and white matchboxes the family kept all over the house for just such a purpose. Power was a luxury; it arrived unpredictably and for only an hour or two a day, if at all, and everyone had learned to adjust to life in the dark. A long night lay before them, and they waited anxiously to see what would happen next. Mr. Sidiqi said little as he joined his daughter on the floor next to the radio to listen to the news from the BBC in London.

Just four miles away, Kamila's older sister Malika was finally winding down a far more eventful day.

“Mommy, I don't feel well,” said Hossein.

Four years old, he was Malika's second child and a favorite of his aunt Kamila. She would play with him in the family's parched yard in Khair Khana and together they would count the goats and sheep that sometimes passed by. Today his small body was seized by stomach pain and diarrhea, which had worsened as the afternoon passed. He lay on the living room floor on a bed of pillows that Malika had made in the center of the large red carpet. Hossein breathed heavily as he fell in and out of a fitful sleep.

Malika studied Hossein and wondered how she would manage. She was several months pregnant with her third child and had spent the day inside, heeding a neighbor's early morning warning to stay home from work because the Taliban were coming. Distractedly she sewed pieces of a rayon suit she was making for a neighbor, and watched with growing concern as Hossein's condition worsened. Beads of sweat now covered his forehead, and his arms and legs were clammy. He needed a doctor.

From her closet Malika selected the largest chador, or headscarf, she owned. She took care to cover not just her head but the lower half of her face as well. Like most educated women in Kabul, she usually wore her scarf draped casually over her hair and across her shoulders. But today was different; if the Taliban really were on their way to Kabul they would be demanding that women be entirely covered in the full-length burqa, known in Dari as a chadri; it concealed not just the head but the entire face. Already this was the rule in Herat and Jalalabad, which had fallen to the Taliban just a few weeks earlier. Since she had no burqa, the oversize veil was the closest Malika could come to following Taliban rules. It would have to suffice.