I can't keep up with Sayed Ahmad. His compact wiry body is constantly on the move, driven to do something good in his beloved land. He has lived his 50-something years here in the province of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. He watched the Soviets enter in the early 80's, then the Mujahadin and then the Taliban. He watched two massive 1,500-year-old Buddhas bombed into oblivion by the Taliban; he watched friends, neighbours, relatives arrested and murdered; he has watched his own community, his people, slowly disintegrate through 30 years of war and then drought.
And so on this spring morning he walks with urgency across the seemingly endless sandstone landscape around Bamiyan. Ahmad is director of the Bamiyan branch of Centre for Cooperation in Afghanistan, which was an underground force during the Taliban years. The centre is sponsored by Church World Services, a Switzerland-based non-governmental agency, with offices in Islamabad and Kabul. Presbyterian World Service and Development works with CWS to provide food, shelter and economic development projects in both countries. We are following a pair of schoolteachers through many villages and back alleys, as they try to find students to attend their programming.
The teachers find children playing or working and follow them home where they get the parents to agree to send them for schooling. The parents invariably believe that education is a good idea, in theory, but not for their child, who is needed to do chores. and, Ahmad is there, gently cajoling, supporting his teachers, never in the way, and yet never out of the picture.
“The story of Afghanistan today falls into three parts: before the Taliban, after the Taliban and during the Taliban,” he had told me the previous day. “Before the Taliban were the Soviets and the Mujahadin. the Soviets caused a lot of damage. they bombarded schools, infrastructure, arrested the educated and skilled workers. After Russia, the Mujahadin also killed people, and by different names brought language discrimination, ethnic discrimination, they rocketed villages and there was lots of door-to-door fighting. Both Russia and the Mujahadin destroyed the economy. They destroyed the psychological system of the country.
“There was loss of hope, loss of relatives, loss of property and loss of hope for life.”
Sayed Ahmad is driven to restore what was lost.
Kabul is a dustbowl surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It was once a jewel in the Hindu-Kush, a vacationing destination, a honeymoon spot. Today, you need steel binding in your spine to survive the roads. From the airport at the edge of the city to where I was staying in the middle of the city, there was one stretch of approximately 100 metres that was fully paved. The rest was horribly potholed, or just plain raw.
When Church World Services opened offices here in 2004 they had to bring all furnishings in from Pakistan—desks, chairs, computers, cabinets could not be found in Kabul. The city has grown some since then. I saw one car and one home appliance dealership. In the absence of hardwired phone service, cell phones and wireless are ubiquitous—you can buy cell phone cards on the street; along with foreign currency. Even from the remoteness of Bamiyan I was able to phone home everyday using a cheap cell phone.
There are public schools — not many and not well serviced, but they do exist, and are open to girls as well. Kids go to school in shifts because there aren't enough teachers, desks and rooms: public school in the morning; middle school in the late morning; and teens in the afternoon. I was told that tens of thousands of students had applied this year to Kabul university for only a few thousand seats.
There is a simple and basic lack of infrastructure. There are very few signs of a middle class, with that portion of the population replaced by foreign non-governmental agencies. Their vehicles — 4x4s, Land rovers — dominate the roads the way their agencies dominate the city. The most common symbol I saw was the blue “UN” on cars and buildings; followed by the red cross and the red crescent (the Muslim Red Cross). The American Agency for International Development has a large presence, as does the Aga Khan Foundation (a branch of which has built one of its signature Serena hotels in Kabul; basic rooms start at $200 uS). My flight from Islamabad was filled with aid workers (and a dollop of diplomats). They are working as advisors to the struggling government of President Hamid Karzai; they are developing programs for women, for youths, for economic development, for food, for education.
This, however, creates a false economy servicing the aid community. There are some nice restaurants and pubs. I had dinner at a French restaurant, where I was served a potable glass of wine. For one purchase, I negotiated the price in American dollars and then paid in Pakistani rupees and local Afghanis. I could also have used yens, yuans or euros. But don't be fooled by this cosmopolitanism. This is a developing country, in the most basic definition. The town of Bamiyan looks like something out of the Wild West — dirt roads, wooden buildings, lean, hungry residents. Below the thin veneer of cell phones, SUVs and international currency is a people with needs and very few means.
Three decades ago Afghanistan was considered an enlightened and progressive Muslim nation. A benign young king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, introduced sweeping reforms in 1964. Within a decade the king's cousin had taken power and revoked the constitution. In another five years, he too was gone and replaced by the Communist party. The Soviet Union invaded in 1979, entering Kabul on Christmas Day. Their presence ushered in a geopolitical game: a curious union of bedfellows comprising the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Each with its own concern, financed and assisted rebels (Mujahadin) to fight the Soviets. Amongst the non-Afghans involved in this fighting, in his case for the preservation of an Islamic nation, was a wealthy businessman named Osama Bin Laden. He would go on to found an organization called al-Qaeda. The Soviets pulled out in 1989, and lost control of Afghanistan in 1992 to the Mujahadin, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. (Massoud would later lead the fight against the rise of the Taliban and was assassinated on September 9, 2001. He is considered a hero and a martyr in Afghanistan.)
Ahmad wastes few words describing this period. “The Mujahadins, with Tajiks they destroyed houses of the Hazara; with Hazara they destroyed Tajiks. They made violence against other tribes. These painful events are out of my language to fully tell the story.”
By 2000 the Taliban, a group of scholars and intellectuals who interpret Islam through a severe fundamentalism, had grown out of the southern province of Kandahar to rule most of the country. They saw education, ecumenism, interfaith relations and non-compliance as unacceptable to their allah. They were willing to punish, banish or kill anyone who crossed their self-defined lines. This included two silent but powerful 61-metre Buddhas that had been carved as part relief, part sculpture centuries earlier in the Bamiyan valley. The statues were deemed craven images of false gods. Once part of a great Buddhist empire that extended across the Indian subcontinent (millennia-old temples are still being excavated in northern Pakistan), Afghanistan has been a Muslim country for more than 800 years. It has a very long and honourable history of tolerance.
“No one was safe from the Taliban,” says Ahmad. “They were killing everybody. People left their houses and their property. They left for the mountains, for Iran or Pakistan.
“The Taliban were mostly Kandahari but they were mostly foreigners—Chechans, Pakistani, Saudi, Chinese.
“One day the Taliban killed 300 people over 11 hours. There was a 17-year-old getting married and the family pleaded for him. But the Taliban killed him in front of the family. He was the only son.
“The Buddhas were not even men,” notes Ahmad. “They were only stone and they blasted them.
“There was so much killing there was no one left to bury the dead. Muslims use a white cloth for burial but there was no cloth left. the women would collect The dead. There was no one to pray over the bodies.
“And then there was the drought. There were no rains, no water. People would escape to the mountains with their animals and then the animals would die. They lost everything.”
Ahmad was arrested once. Fifty people were left in one room for three days with only water. And then released. He escaped to another part of Bamiyan. “There was no hope. Bamiyan was dead.”
I met a family that had 11 graves on its compound; a very common story in Bamiyan. Go to a high place and look across endless kilometers of barren sandstone and you will see lots of makeshift flags—coloured bits of cloth tied to sticks. Each flag marks a grave, each grave that of somebody killed, most likely by the Taliban, but also by the Soviets or the Mujahadin. These are memory markers for a people who are very much connected to their families, their cultural heritage and their land. In one conversation a group of men (it's always men, the women are hidden from view, certainly my view) recited an endless list of atrocities. I present them here not judging their veracity but as an expression of the psychological state of the people I met: In one day, they told me, 1,400 people were killed by Russians in Laghman province; in one day 10,000 Uzbeks, Hazara and Tajiks [three of the many ethnic groups in Afghanistan] were killed by the Taliban in the town of Mazar-i-Sharif; in Chomadi more than 1,000 were killed by the Taliban; also in Mazar-i-Sharif, 8,000 Taliban were killed by NATO forces during the collapse. (Since these oral testimonies did not come with dates it is hard to track them down. I tried, and found some evidence from an amnesty International inquiry and a CBC report that the stories, while exaggerated, do have some truth. I accept the numbers as respect for the dead, for the past.)
Those 11 flags on the compound keep that family whole, as uncles, aunts, mothers, fathers, cousins, grandparents coexist with the past, along with their cattle and their traditions, on a hundred square metres or so. They live in the same sort of houses they have for centuries—mud and straw, sun-baked, halfmetre-thick walls, cooled or heated with dung patties as needed, with a few small rooms where people eat, sleep, cook and chat. A few modern conveniences have crept in: cell phones, satellite television and spotty electricity. But these new currents don't affect the traditions.
And while the deaths accumulated during the Taliban years, the rains stopped in 14 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, including Bamiyan. Too busy dodging bullets, the locals didn't pay proper attention to the drought. They picked vegetation as needed, even though there was less of it each year. They inadvertently stripped bare all root systems, so even if there was a flash storm (for half an hour or so) nothing holds the water. Locals pointed to bare sandy hills and insisted they were once verdant. It was hard to believe; but turn your head in the opposite direction and there's a little bridge over sand. There must have been a creek there once.
The drought forced more people onto the refugee track, an endless stream of the desperate willing to live in cramped camps, in canvas tents, because, if nothing else, they get food. (It is estimated that over three million Afghans left the country for Pakistan and Iran.) and those who remained spend up to four hours a day walking to a diminishing river that runs through the Bamiyan valley. every day, by foot or by donkey, filling cans to the brim, to feed, wash, cook for themselves and their boney, meatless cattle. The water-gathering task is often given to the children and women. Six- to 10-year-olds spend their day carrying water cans many times their weight.
And that is why the schoolteachers, funded through Ahmad's agency, are scouring the Bamiyan valley, looking for children to teach. And that is why they meet so much resistance—the children are integral to the economic viability of the struggling peasants. And that is why Sayed Ahmad is restless; he knows education is a powerful tool that will save his nation.
One of the teachers for the program is named Zahra; and when I first met her I told her I had a daughter with the same name. I proudly pulled out a photograph from my wallet, of a five-year-old girl in a sundress running carelessly through a front yard. Zahra, the teacher, stared at my child's picture for many minutes, passing it on to the other teachers, each staring at it as if this child were from another planet. I became uncomfortable waiting for them to return the photo. (Often when you share a child's photo with others they look at it for a few seconds, coo some appropriate words and pass it back.) A child like the one they were staring at did not exist in their world.
Abdul Wakil Shergul told me education has never been a priority in Afghanistan. I met him at the Bamiyan airport (a fancy name for a dirt strip and a few shacks). Like so many Afghans whom I met, he invited me to lunch. I met him at his offices at the united Nations High Commission for refugees where he has worked for two decades. over lunch—rice, meat, flat bread, fruit, cola and cigarettes — he told me his story. He is in his 50s. As a boy he taught himself his numbers and a few letters by looking at the family Koran. He wanted to get an education but his father was adamantly against it. A cousin sneaked him into the school and lied to cover Shergul's presence. Within a month the dad had stormed the school and pulled his son. The next year, the cousin did it again, bribing the teacher to hide Shergul when the dad came by. Finally Shergul's father relented.
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Abdul Shergul is rare in his country: a member of the minority middle class. He remained in Afghanistan because, as he readily admits, he was lucky enough to work with the UN early on as a communications officer at the UNHCR. One of his sons had a similar position with Hamid Karzai's government, but has recently become an advisor. Shergul dreams of opening a school in his native village after he retires. And like many other Afghans I met, he has great sympathy with Karzai and the fledgling government. He believes in Karzai's sincerity and agrees steps have been taken in the right direction. But the rest of the cabinet is a collection of governors from the 34 provinces—ancient rivalries, petty politics, local concerns, hidden agendas, blatant jealousy and ambition overwhelm the national issues.
His recipe for Afghanistan is simple, and one that was repeated to me often by others: beat back the Taliban, stabilize the government, provide greater access to education, encourage investment and rebuild the infrastructure. His country desperately needs 25 years of peace to undo the past quarter century. And remarkably, despite what he has lived through, he is hopeful for the future.
Hope is the one theme I returned to continuously, especially with Nejabat Khan Safi, the one person I spent the most amount of time with during my week in Afghanistan. He is Assistant Disaster Response Coordinator of Church World Service, Afghanistan. I spoke to him in Urdu and he spoke to me in English as both of us used each other to practice our language skills.
Safi is a proud Afghan, a devout Muslim and traditional in his outlook. He grew up in a neighbouring country, where he lived, studied and worked in an Afghan bubble. He is precisely the person that the UNHCR is hoping to attract back. Still, the struggles inside of Nejabat Khan Safi are the real struggles within his native country. And that was why for a week, in English and Urdu, we carefully parsed the word hope.
Safi was born in 1974, just at the beginning of the troubles. His father was a senior bureaucrat. When the Soviets arrived, the family was forced to flee. They began walking towards the Pakistani border. Along the way their father got very sick after drinking water from a fetid pond used by animals. The father begged the family to leave him behind to die. Safi, who was eight and the eldest of three kids, made the decision that they should all live or die together.
They settled finally in a refugee camp outside of Mansehra, Pakistan. Extended family lent them a tent, which was reclaimed a few months later. The family built a lean-to and lived there for a while. Finally an aid organization provided them with their own tent and Safi describes that as a proud day for the family.
He went to primary school in Mansehra, later moving to an Afghan boarding school in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he also attended an Afghan university. He got a degree in civil engineering, but there was no work available in that field. He returned to Mansehra and taught in a high school. He began working for aid agencies.
The buzzword in the NGO community is “capacity building,” which means teaching the locals to build and run their infrastructure — government, civil service, army, police, schools, etc. Safi's “capacity” is well developed—he understands and promotes, through the various projects he administers, Western ideas of equity and access—but the issues he struggles with are not straightforward. He is married to a woman who cannot read or write, because his generation of Afghan women did not receive education. He has two “tween” sisters who are unschooled, because his father (like Shergul's, a generation earlier) does not believe that women should be educated. He would like to send his own son to school but is afraid for his safety because kidnappers assume any child going to school must come from a monied family. Horrific stories of kidnapped children are common on Afghan news.
Safi teaches his wife to read and write, and does the same surreptitiously for his sisters. He also has a daughter for whom he wishes the brightest future. He is the sole breadwinner for his family, which in traditional Afghan fashion extends beyond the merely nuclear, including his siblings and parents. They are in Afghanistan because he got a job at a Christian-based aid agency.
He has incredible compassion and patience for traditions — our conversation was filled with discussion of Afghan customs. But it wasn't till we spoke as fathers that our conversation became darkly personal. By choice he has no ticket out of Afghanistan, but he would consider it for his children. When he hears stories of children in the West, like mine, he wonders if it wouldn't be better to leave, to begin again in a world not eviscerated by history. Nejabat Safi is torn between being an Afghan and a father. He sees his own life as a bridge to some future which he has not yet properly defined. He exists only to serve that future. And, in response I present the only effectual tool I have: my prayers that his children find the peace they deserve.
Months after my return I met a Canadian soldier, about half my age, who had done a tour of duty in Kandahar. We had seen different parts of Afghanistan and we compared notes. We agreed that Afghans were absolutely wonderful people — warm, giving, open. He told me he believed all they needed was a prolonged period of peace, so they could rebuild their country. He said he was eager to get back; that there was something he loved about that place, but he couldn't define it for me.
Our conversation took me back to Afghanistan and I was emotionally overwhelmed once more. I have never felt so helpless and hopeless as I did after my first day in Bamiyan. I had met people who had been beaten senseless by circumstance and there was nothing I could do to relieve their hunger or their pain immediately. While at the same time I saw the incremental hopefulness propelling Shergul, Safi and Ahmad. These three Muslims taught me a lot about hope and the power of faith.
That is where Afghanistan exists, between its crumbling infrastructure and its hope for a peaceful future. Some of that depends on the Taliban in Kandahar, which is where the fighting is. The presence is relatively small but it has a huge psychological weight in the country. The outcome of that fighting directs the nation, and Afghans look longingly to their government to lead the way. At the same time, they are practical people and they turn to aid agencies to fix the infrastructure.
Like that soldier I too have left a piece of myself in Afghanistan. And like him I struggle to define it. It wasn't merely pathos but, perhaps, its direct opposite: a palpable hopefulness. Or perhaps that sense of urgency, the physical immediacy which I saw Sayed Ahmad, Abdul Wakil Shergul and Nejabat Khan Safi wrap around themselves every morning.
