 |
 |
| ||||
|
|
"I come from a country that no longer exists. You see, I come from Afghanistan." A Place at the End of the World By Janine di Giovanni (Vanity Fair)
The flat barge that carries passengers across the Amu Dar'ya, the river that separates Tajikistan from Afghanistan, takes less than 10 minutes, but the journey is into another world. The Amu Dar'ya, also called the Oxus, was the former boundary between the Russian and the British Empires, and even now, 82 years after Afghanistan's independence from Britain was established, the land around the river has a feeling of being on the edge of the world. In the darkness, the only light comes from the full moon and from fires burning on the banks of the Afghan side. Soldiers huddle around them, casting strange, distorted shadows. It is three weeks since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. American forces have been massing in this part of the world, some kind of action is expected soon, and the Russian soldiers who patrol the Tajik border and check passports by flashlight at the barge dock are jittery. On the other side of the river, the passport control is a shack in which three Afghans sit cross-legged around a petrol lantern, their automatic rifles resting on their laps. The man checking passports leans forward, points to my hair, and shakes his own head violently. This is northern Afghanistan, not under Taliban control, but I am still supposed to wear a headscarf, and I forgot. It takes two hours by ancient Soviet jeep to reach Khoje Bahauddin, an outback town in the province of Takhar that has become the provincial seat of the Northern Alliance since Taloqan, the Takhar capital, fell to Taliban troops last year. There is no road to Khoje Bahauddin, only tracks in hardened dust. The jeep shivers, sputters, and finally grinds to a halt after an hour, in the middle of the desert. As the driver argues with a companion about how to fix it, I fall asleep, huddled against the cold metal of the jeep. When I awake an hour later, back on the "road," I recall a conversation I had two decades ago in a post office in Parioli, an affluent Roman neighborhood. I had met an elderly man. We were both waiting to use the public telephones. His clothes were shabby and foreign, and he had the troubled eyes of someone who was far from home. I asked him where that was. His long face sagged. "I come from a country that no longer exists," he said after a pause. "You see, I come from Afghanistan." I understand the impact of his words only now that I am here, in a country of many sorrows, a country that has been buried alive by outside invaders, by war, by famine, by history. Afghanistan, peopled by dozens of frequently antagonistic ethnic groups, is one of the poorest nations on earth. Its modern history begins with the invasion of India by Nader Shah of Persia, after which the Mughals lost control of all their territories west of the river Indus. In 1747, after Nader Shah was assassinated, a 23-year-old member of the Durrani Pashtun tribe, the country's largest, fought his way back to his homeland and founded a kingdom in the territory that would become Afghanistan, establishing himself as King Ahmad Shah Durrani. The Russian czars had designs on Afghanistan but were thwarted by Great Britain, which took precarious control of the region in the early 1840s and then again in 1879. It was the British who in 1893 first drew the modern border between Afghanistan and Pakistan (which was then part of India), in the process sundering the homelands of some Afghan tribes. But the British never had much of a handle on Afghanistan, and after a third attempt at taking control in 1919, they finally gave up. Afghans are proud of the independence they won that year, but strategically they remain highly vulnerable, surrounded as they are by Iran, Pakistan, and China, with Russia and India on the near horizon. The country's recent history has been one of conflict and treachery, beginning with the peaceful Soviet-assisted overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973 by a cousin of his, former prime minister Mohammad Daoud. A subsequent Marxist coup and increasing unrest among Islamic nationalists provided the pretext for the 1979 Soviet invasion. On Christmas Eve that year the Red Army seized Kabul's airport, and four Soviet motorized divisions rolled over the border. The country soon descended into a savage war, one in which teenage Russian soldiers fought against mujahideen fighters-Afghanistan's anti-Soviet, U.S.-backed shock troops. This was to be the last great stand of the Cold War, and the scars of this 10-year conflict still cut deep into the Russian soul, that nation's version of Vietnam. As the late Russian journalist Artyom Borovik wrote, "Afghanistan became part of each person who fought there. And each of the half-million soldiers who went through this war became part of Afghanistan-part of the land that could never absorb all the blood that spilled on it." By the time the last Soviet tank rolled back over the bridge separating Afghanistan from Uzbekistan in 1989, the country had been devastated, and was ripe for a series of new battles in which rival warlords and the country's nominal government fought over the last remnants of Afghan nationhood. By October 1994, vulnerable to anyone who would promise its residents a better life, the southern city of Kandahar fell to an obscure militia of religious students, or Taliban, led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, who called for 4,000 volunteers from Pakistan. Some of the Taliban (the plural form of the singular, Talib) were former mujahideen, but the majority were young Koranic students drawn from the hundreds of madaris (Islamic theology schools) that had been set up in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. By 1996, 1.5 million people had been killed since the 1979 Soviet invasion. Weariness, fear, and desperation opened the doors to the Taliban. In September 1996, when Kabul fell, they were first welcomed as liberators. But the world watched in horror as Najibullah, the Communist ex-president, was tortured and killed. (Like many Afghans, he used only one name.) Slowly and methodically, the Taliban plunged the country into their vision of seventh-century Arabia, of life in the immediate wake of the prophet Muhammad. This was a new agenda for Islamic radicalism. Afghanistan was declared "a completely Islamic state," and the door to the West, to progress, to any kind of advancement, was abruptly slammed shut. Life under the Taliban became life behind a shroud. Girls were banned from schools. Women were forced to wear burkas-head-to-toe garments even more extreme than the traditional Muslim veil-in which they could barely see or hear, and were more or less ordered to stay at home. Men were commanded to grow beards long enough to grasp in one's hand, or else be imprisoned. Television, playing cards, music, and photography were banned. If a woman's shoes made too much noise, she would be beaten, because this was said to incite lust in men. Intellectuals were repressed and jailed. Public executions, stonings, and lashings took place to the glee of the Taliban soldiers, who provided security with their Datsun jeeps and Kalashnikov assault rifles. Money poured in from Arab benefactors. Gradually, the Taliban, most of whose members are Pashtun, took more than 90 percent of the country. The intellectuals who could flee did so; the ones who could not chose to live underground and draw as little attention to themselves as possible. The remnants of the government that had been pushed out of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996 began to form a loose opposition under the command of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the son of an officer in the old royal army. Massoud's troops, the Shura-e-Nazar, had been the strongest force during the war against the Russians. Now, he re-formed his largely Tajik and Uzbek army, dubbed the Northern Alliance or the United Front, along with the men of other commanders who were intent on laying aside their rivalries and banishing the common enemy-the Taliban. For six years, the Northern Alliance worked alone, with some assistance from Russia and Iran, but it was largely ignored by the West. Massoud tried to rally support, but aside from France, where he was a popular, romanticized Resistance figure, no one in Europe or America took much notice of the Afghan opposition. On September 9, 2001, two days before the attacks on America, Commander Massoud met with two "Belgian journalists" in Khoje Bahauddin at the alliance's headquarters. One of the journalists-they were, in fact, North Africans and are suspected to have been members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network-carried a video camera, inside of which was hidden a bomb. Leaning forward, one man posed a question to Massoud: "And what will you do with Osama when you get him?" Massoud moved to answer, and the cameraman detonated his device. Massoud, who was called "the Lion of Panjshir," was dead, and with him went the West's great hope of a charismatic leader who could stand up to the Taliban. In Khoje Bahauddin, when I finally arrive at headquarters late at night, one of Massoud's former bodyguards, Nasir, a young soldier from the Panjshir Valley, leads me with a lantern to find a space on the floor to sleep. In the morning, he smiles and shows me where to find water that a donkey had carried up from the river below the village. He sits quietly with me, staring at the blackened room, a bombed-out shell, where Massoud was killed. The blood of Massoud and the suicide bombers is still splattered on the wall. In the next room, I eat breakfast with the soldiers who guarded Massoud. We sit on the floor, and they share their bread and tea, motioning for me to take more, and to dip the bread into Russian cream that they pour from a carton. "Eat, eat," says one. "Before the ... " With his hand, he playacts firing a gun. "Before the fighting." When I point to the blackened room, the soldiers grow silent. "They killed our leader," Nasir says, the gentleness of his face suddenly turning to something hard, something vengeful. "Now we will fight them until we die." PART 1 ~ PART 2 |
|
|
||