“The Americans have condemned the Afghan people for ever,” Mohammed says. I can feel his heartbreak. “The use of the weapons of mass destruction destroyed every avenue of hope and prosperity for the Afghan people. The U.S. dropped unexploded cluster bomblets. They were yellow and almost identical to the ready-to-eat meals parachuted from the air to “save” hungry Afghans. Meanwhile, the ten million mines from the Soviets’ invasion in the 1980’s terrify and kill Afghans on daily basis. The U.S. used the Afghan people to defeat the former Soviet Union and then abandoned them to die and maim. The legacy of death and destruction from the past and the present haunts Afghans as they try to survive their daily misery.”
Mohammed has turned away from the U.S. “liberation” job schemes and high salaries of the non-government “humanitarian” sector in Afghanistan. He leaves Afghanistan soon after I do, and he uses his own money to produce a photo book—Afghanistan After Democracy (www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.com) . He hopes to raise awareness and funds to build a small hospital and a uranium research facility to help his people.
“There’s uranium from American weapons all over the country, causing birth defects and other casualties. This is not reported by the Western media.” Mohammed pulls out photos collected by the maternity staff at a hospital in Kabul. They are photos of deformed babies. I am unable to eat my breakfast and I want to run away from the table, and from Mohammed, and from Afghanistan.
I am sitting on a rooftop on a steep hillside in Kabul negotiating with Froozan and Shehkib to travel to the north. Froozan is twenty-one and cousin Shehkib is twenty-three. Yes, he has a good car. Yes, he knows all the military commanders and he can get us interviews. Yes, he can take me to the poppy farmers. No, nothing less than $95 a day, I pay gas and food. No, I don’t have to pay for repairs if the car breaks down. We negotiate the price. We will leave for Mazar-i-Sharif in two days.An hour with Froozan teaches me more than two days with Azar. “The U.S. wants to maintain a presence in Afghanistan,” Froozan says. “The majority of Afghan people believe that this is, first, to get investments, to make money, and second, to use Afghanistan to control Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Iran. If the U.S. keeps the war going it has a reason to stay. If the fighting stops, the Afghan people will say: “Why is the United States military still here?”
I grew a beard for Afghanistan. I also wore traditional clothes, with Froozan and Shehkib’s instruction. Wherever we go the men ask, privately, curiously, from where in Afghanistan is that one from? I speak a few key phrases in Dari, greet with As-salamu alaykum, and I am treated kindly and warmly.
Froozan and Shehkib everywhere prowl after girls. I learn about gender dynamics by watching them. They also probed me about Western women. “I have been with prostitutes,” Froozan boasted. “But I cannot let my father know this. I have been to brothels in China too. There’s a lot of prostitution in Afghanistan.” Froozan described the Chinese bars where Americans go for sex, and how prostitution is officially forbidden and secretly encouraged. He told me how Afghan girls on their wedding night have to prove that they are virgins. Froozan will expect this of his bride; it is his heritage, his entitlement. “Blood is collected on a handkerchief, but if she is not a virgin a girl will be forbidden to marry unless with a widower.”
In two weeks with Shehkib and Froozan we have fun together, and they challenge me, and I challenge them. In the end, Shehkib and Froozan are humbled mildly by life’s surprises. They promised a lot, but they couldn’t produce, and they wouldn’t admit it. Flying across the plains of Sheberghan the windshield exploded and the shattered glass poured onto us like hail. I agree to pay for the new windshield, since we can’t work the dusty roads without it. When the brakes fail on the car, I pay.
And then I get sick, and it is no fun. Froozan and Shehkib can’t understand how I could be so sick and still want to keep working, so they decide I am not sick at all. But I am sick for a week, hardly get out of bed, and my fixers play—hot baths at the bathhouses, cruising the town in the car, extra time at the mosque—and still they hold me to the agreed daily rate. Soldiers take us prisoner in Kunduz, and I have to fix it.
My fixers knew some things, and what they didn’t know they made up for with the boldness and arrogance of youth and good looks. They are handsome, and they have trained in martial arts, and they are strong but overconfident. Their whole lives are before them, and they want their piece of the pie, and they will work for anyone to get it. Froozan worked as a fixer for Dyncorp, he says, until another fixer was beheaded “for betraying Afghanistan and working for terrorists.” Froozan’s father forced him to quit. They didn’t care why I was there, as long as they got paid.
But they fawn and lurk—and slow the car—when they see a woman’s ankles showing under her gown, and a woman in blue jeans—unlikely outside Kabul—stirs their testosterone and heats their Dari conversations. They don’t speak to the women, ever. They get excited about women, who are shrouded by burkhas and gowns, and I laugh out loud at this, and they are confused and embarrassed. It is profoundly ridiculous, I tell them, laughing, to leer at a mummy.
It is impossible for me to get close to women, to understand this side of Afghan society and culture. The walled compounds in the countryside are sealed to me, unless I am with the men of the family, and then the women are hidden. Almost everything is forbidden. I come to see the burkha as both prison, and fortress, enslaving femininity, and protecting it from raw, male aggression. I am told that this perception is culturally arrogant, that the burkha is always worn with honor, by choice.
Young women all over the country set themselves on fire with kerosene. Immolation is escape. Men of some families try to beat the spirit out of young women, and the trauma and social upheaval of the occupation make it worse. Women are traded here. Young women take pills, cut wrists, hang themselves—anything to escape an arranged marriage to an older man, or marriage to erase a debt.
“There is an epidemic of suicides,” a woman from RAWA tells me. RAWA is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Two RAWA women had met me in the Spinzar lobby. They are young but undeterred by the taboo of meeting a Western man in public. They wear scarves but no burkhas. “Many women who burn themselves do not die and then they endure unspeakable misery.”
The women tell me the U.S. has brought fundamentalism to Afghanistan. I hear this over and over. We do this by supporting a government of warlords and drug-runners: President Hamid Kharzai’s brother, Wali Kharzai, is the leading agent in the opium and heroin trade. With all the negativity attributed to the Taliban, the Taliban had crushed the opium and heroine trade, and they forbade forced marriages and protected the inheritance rights of women.
“The Taliban—these are not terrorists,” Shehkib says later. “The occupation is creating the Taliban. Every time American soldiers break down a door in the middle of the night they create another family of Taliban.” The Pashtun people in the south are very conservative. It is a question of honor, says Froozan. He tells me about sexual atrocities committed by occupation forces buying children. “You never dishonor my family, because you dishonor me. Not in Afghanistan. I will become what you call “Taliban.” And I will kill you.”
In Kabul there are few advertisements and outside Kabul, none. The few billboards are campaigning against opium or celebrating the martyred hero Ahmed Shah Massoud. If you have not read the history of Afghanistanwritten by white people you are able to learn about this man without prejudice. And while poppy cultivation is publicly admonished, farmers everywhere grow poppies, and after talking with them I support it. It is the same old story: destroy the lives and livelihoods of rural farmers, but give them no reasonable choices. But the absence of advertising is something you must see for yourself. There are only the dead tanks advertising war.
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