Human Cargo (41 page)

Nasir stood out from the others. He was dark and clean-shaven, and he wore pale gray trousers of lightweight wool, brown loafers, and a checked poplin button-down shirt, newly ironed; his hair was cut short and very neat. Nasir had glasses, unmistakably Western, which gave him a mild, scholarly air; there was a mobile telephone in his shiny leather briefcase, and his new belt was probably, like his loafers, made in Italy. His manner was tentative; like his faint foreign overtones, it had something unsure about it, almost wary.

As the night wore on, as a second and then a third television crew joined the queue, and then some more aid workers, Nasir and I began to talk. He was, he told me in his uneven American accent, an Afghan who had been forced to flee Kabul in 1979, when, as the son of a prominent family, he had been suspected of political interests inimical to the incoming regime. One by one, all of his large family had been driven abroad, for fear that they would not escape the repressions of the Communist regime. No one expected to be gone for long. Nasir, his wife, and their two sons went to America. He did well as a businessman in electronics, and his wife gave birth to a third son. All the children were soon fluent in English as well as in their native Pashtu and Dari, and all later went on to earn master’s degrees. Though Nasir’s marriage did not survive the long exile, he built himself a large house in the suburbs of Washington and described to me with pride the fine tall trees in his garden. His business thrived. Year by year, he watched from afar the mujahedeen’s
struggle for power, observed the Taliban’s rise, and later celebrated their defeat. He was intrigued by the new Afghanistan and what it might have to offer. He wondered what he had to offer his country himself, since he had money and a good house and an American passport, and his sons were grown men. He had come to look. Afghanistan needed trained and professional Afghans, he said to me, as the night wore slowly on; it needed people who spoke the languages, who remembered the past, and who wanted to shape the future. With his easy, Americanized ways, Nasir believed he might be the kind of person who was wanted. And he had cousins he had not seen for over two decades who had endured the Communist and mujahedeen and Taliban years in quiet, unobtrusive jobs at the university or in the civil service, making no enemies. Nasir had houses in Afghanistan, too, one of them a large compound in the center of old Kabul, where his grandparents had lived and his father had grown up. He had plans to open a factory and possibly broker a series of deals between foreign organizations and the new administration to provide water for the city. He was excited by what was waiting.

Kabul lies a little over two hours from Dubai by plane, over an unbroken landscape of ocher and beige mountains. There are almost no trees, though occasionally, far below, you can trace the course of a river cut into the rock, edged with a long green strip of wheat fields and orchards. The airport, six months after the allied invasion, was pitted with deep holes where shells had landed; just off the runways lay the burned-out planes of Afghanistan’s small air force; beyond, by the ruins of hangars, were tanks destroyed in the last weeks of fighting. The air was clean and clear; the tawny mountains, tipped by snow that descended in rivulets of white along the cusp, stretched away forever in patterns of color that seemed to grow darker with distance; the sky was very blue. The airport hall was cramped, noisy, frenetic; there were soldiers and UN posters about land mines and security precautions. “Do not travel,” said one, “to places that other people are not going to.” Arriving passengers were given forms to fill in, with questions about identity and
address. Not knowing what to write, I looked for Nasir, and found him leaning silently against a pillar in the chaos. He was biting his lips, his pencil poised in the air above his form, hesitating.

There was only one blank left on his form. “What,” asked this last question, “is the reason for your visit?” As I watched, Nasir’s pencil descended. In English, in a firm, large, rounded hand, he wrote: “Coming home.”

•   •   •

THE AFGHANS KNOW
about exile. Until recently, theirs was the country with the largest number of its people dispersed—refugees in neighboring Iran and Pakistan, or, farther afield, in America, Germany, Britain, and the Gulf States. During the 1980s and 1990s, when Afghanistan was almost totally cut off from the world, first by the Soviet invasion, then by the mujahedeen conducting their own civil war, and later by the Taliban, I used to read about the refugees, and wonder what it was like to come from a country from which almost one in every four of its inhabitants had fled. From 1979, when Nur Mohamed Taraki declared Afghanistan a democratic republic, and Moscow moved to shore up the insurgency with military equipment and advisers, Afghans had left in waves, via precipitate flights on foot, by car, truck, donkey, and camel, leaving behind houses and lands and possessions and, sometimes, elderly grandparents too frail to make the arduous journey over the mountains to safety. During the confused years of warlords and mujahedeen, during the reign of the austere and punitive young Taliban, bent on imposing their brand of implacable Islam, I used to hear about derelict and abandoned villages, empty except for a handful of elderly people, sometimes sharing a single room for warmth and safety. The young, for the most part single men in their twenties and thirties, but families, too, the women silent and watchful, came to the West with stories of torture and executions.

By the time the allies attacked, on October 6, 2001, those who stayed behind had endured twenty-three years of lawlessness, rape, killings, looting, expulsions, and displacement as, one after another,
groups of fighters, often aided by foreign powers, had destroyed their fabled irrigation system, mined their orchards and fields, leveled their cities, closed their schools and hospitals, plundered their possessions, and driven many of their brightest and strongest abroad. One in four Afghan children could expect to be dead before the age of five. Kabul was virtually destroyed, and sewage ran along open gutters. The handful of tarmac roads that once linked the larger cities—Afghanistan is the size of Texas—had become all but impassable after years of neglect, erosion, and war. The water supply had once been the pride of Afghanistan: through underground canals, the people had irrigated wheat fields, orchards, and vineyards. That system had collapsed under mines and shelling. There was no postal system, no telephone, no national newspaper; all the law books were said to have been burned by the Taliban. There never had been a railway. And there were said to be as many as 10 million unexploded land mines—down wells, in fields, among the ruined houses. A country once self-sufficient had been reduced by war and drought to penury.

After the allies began their bombing, and the warlords, assisted by the Americans, began their advance on Kabul, UN agencies, long in waiting over the Pakistan border in Islamabad and Peshawar, started to prepare for what they assumed would be a new wave of refugees. For a while, there was confusion: Pakistan and then Iran closed their borders, and one heard of terrified and destitute families, clinging together in the rocky, barren no-man’s-land, unable to move either forward or backward. But the predicted exodus never happened. When the borders opened, there were not many people wanting to leave Afghanistan. Most Afghans preferred to sit this conflict out.

On November 13, 2001, Kabul fell. The remnants of the Taliban took to the mountains to the east, along the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan, and to the south, where the valleys and high passes were full of tunnels and secret caves. An Interim Authority was sworn in, to prepare for a
loya jirga
, a grand council of elders, and for eventual democratic elections; in Bonn, the international
community pledged $4.5 billion in aid to rebuild. Afghanistan was in the grip of a four-year drought, and 70 percent of the buildings in Kabul had been reduced to rubble.

In November, when the first humanitarian experts flew cautiously in to scout out the lay of the land, they found Kabul silent, empty, and eerie. The university lay in ruins; in the library, ancient religious tomes had been punctured by bullet holes. Nothing moved on the streets. Around the airport at Bagram, not a single house was standing. By February 2002, the UN agencies and the nongovernmental organizations that had been looking after the Afghan refugees for over two decades in Pakistan were frantically shifting their operations from Peshawar to Kabul, in anticipation of the waves that would now come home. In keeping with a report drafted by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative, Afghanistan was to be regarded as a model for a more coordinated and sensitive approach to UN assistance. “Consultation,” “involvement,” a “light footprint” became the catch phrases of foreign involvement. Kabul, overnight, became hectic, its residents boasting wanly of traffic jams, though apart from ancient yellow taxis, bicycles, and the jeeps carrying heavily armed militia and the ISAF peacekeeping forces, the traffic was all white Toyota Land Cruisers, the logos of aid agencies and NGOs painted on their sides. Kabul had become a place of expectations.

The refugees did start to come home. They came because President Hamid Karzai asked them to, promising that in the new Afghanistan they would prosper and be safe. They came because the UNHCR told them that it would pay for their journeys and give them food and money with which to rebuild their lives. They came because Iran and Pakistan were growing weary of their long-term guests and had started to make Afghans’ lives uneasy with threats and random attacks and demands for bribes. And they came because they wanted to come home, because after years in a foreign land they wished to grow up, or die, in the place their families remembered as their own, where they belonged, and where they were beholden to no one. They were tired of being unwelcome.

By March 2002, though Al Qaeda still controlled some of the mountain areas, though land mines littered their fields, and though their houses had been reduced to rubble, they were on their way back. March is traditionally the first month of migration in this part of the world, when the snows have melted sufficiently to make the high roads passable and when enough months of light and sun remain to plant and build before the bitter cold winter weather descends. By June, they were coming in thousands, by July in tens of thousands, arriving at the outskirts of Kabul, where UNHCR had set up a reception center. They came in buses and trucks, streaming up over the high plateau in clouds of dust at first light, piled high with quilts and bales and buckets, their metalwork brilliantly decorated with peacocks and lovebirds, camels, palm trees, leopards, and lions stalking in jungles. By July, it was clear to everyone that this was likely to be the largest mass return in modern history.

•   •   •

WHEN THE ENGLISH
writer and historian Robert Byron visited Kabul in the 1930s, he found strongly scented yellow and white roses in the British minister’s garden, along with sweet williams, peonies, canterbury bells, and columbines. He noted that the town was small, shady, and set in the middle of a great green plain, the houses surrounded by well-irrigated and neatly tended gardens, with long avenues of trees, mostly poplars. Three quarters of a century later, the city is a ruin, a shell of houses open to the wind and dust, with flies hanging in clouds over the deep gutters that act as open sewers along the roads. There are very few roses anywhere.

I note that the city is crowded with jeeps in which ride soldiers with their rifles at the ready, and that the boys in the streets are selling long green cucumbers that hang like fat worms from their barrows, and flat sheets of bread that look like loofahs, pinned up by pegs, much as the Chinese hang up ducks in the windows of restaurants. Half the women are wearing sky-blue burqas, with their small mesh panels for their eyes, while the rest wind scarves around their heads. After dark, when a curfew confines foreigners to their hotels
and guest houses, the talk is of warlords, weapons, opium, and the assassination of the vice president, shot, it is said, on the orders of another warlord. The electricity supply is still erratic, there is not much water, and the telephones do not work, because the UN has installed one system for itself and the government, and aid agencies have installed another, for everyone else: the two are not compatible. This creating a new country is heady work for those who sweated out the Taliban years, for those who went into exile and spent the time dreaming of a better future, for the aid world, which perceives a virgin land on which to try its new theories, for lawyers who plan to draft a constitution full of the human rights so long denied the Afghans, for women, escaping the terrible isolation imposed on them by the misogynist Taliban, and for the UN, for whom Afghanistan may provide redemption after the debacles of Rwanda and Somalia. Playing at new countries is fun.

Not many districts of Kabul were as badly shelled as the west, traditionally home to the Hazaras, among the most persecuted of Afghanistan’s main ethnic groups. The Hazaras are descendants of the Mongols and Turks who fought with Genghis Khan and lost their lands and lives in successive brushes with Tajik and Pashtun warlords, who killed or enslaved over half their number in the late nineteenth century. Wanting to learn what the returning refugees are up against, I went to West Kabul, which, in July 2002, still looked like photographs of Berlin in 1945. Mounds of earth and dirt marked where houses once stood, though the jagged remains of more solid buildings lined the main roads; the rafters for the roofs have long since gone, taken by the Taliban for firewood.

But West Kabul is already also a place of purpose. The Hazaras, accustomed to conflict and defeat, had planned their exodus two decades earlier with foresight. Fleeing the civil war and the Taliban, they had journeyed for the most part together, over the mountains to the east, to the cities and refugee camps of Pakistan. There, they had regrouped and waited. Twenty or more years later, they were still there, still together and waiting, and when news came that Kabul was again safe, they hired trucks with the money promised by
UNHCR and traveled back together to reclaim their part of the city. In Pakistan, the Hazaras had become renowned weavers of carpets, and now whole factories decided to make the journey home together, the owners and middlemen as well as the weaver families whose young children provide the bulk of the work force. They brought with them their vats, dyes, and wool. And because the workday for the children includes several hours of schooling, the Hazaras brought their schools with them, the teachers accompanying their pupils in the peacock-and-leopard-painted buses and trucks.