The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

My Afghan friends were still there, life passing them by. The dashing young guerrillas had turned into balding middle-aged men with potbellies and glasses, left adrift by the West’s abandonment of their cause. Increasingly contemptuous of Pakistan where they had to live but which they blamed for all Afghanistan’s woes, one old friend called Hamid Gilani told me with glee that an Italian restaurant called Luna Caprese had opened in Islamabad and suggested we dine there. When I arrived, there was an open can of Coca-Cola at my place. ‘It’s special Coke to drink a toast to the old days,’ he laughed. Lifting it to drink, I realised he had filled it with illicit red wine.

Behind Hamid’s glasses I could see crescents of tears rimming his eyes. ‘Seeing you cleans my heart’, he said. ‘You have a husband, a baby, a job and a home and I salute you. I am a man who has given his youth to the struggle for a place that no longer exists.’

Suddenly on September 11

all that changed as half a world away two planes smashed into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. Danger had come out of a clear blue sky and nothing would be the same again. Watching the horribly compelling scene over and over on my television, holding my two-year-old son Lourenço who kept shouting ‘Mummy, plane crashing’, I listened to the pundits pontificate on who might be responsible. That the planes had been hijacked by suicide bombers immediately pointed to the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, Washington’s arch-enemy, was top of the list of suspects. But there was another name. That of Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden. Not only had he repeatedly vowed war on the West, but, said one expert, he had even sent a message from his lair in Afghanistan to an Arab newspaper a few weeks earlier saying that he was planning a spectacular attack.

Afghanistan. It was as if a ghost had walked across my grave. As the map came up on the screen to show viewers the whereabouts of this forgotten country squashed between Iran, Pakistan, the – stans of central Asia and one thin arm just touching China, I instinctively clutched at my neck for the silver charm I used to wear on a chain. The charm was a map of a far-away country with the words Allah-o-Akbar, God is Great, etched across it in lapis lazuli, and it had been given to me years before by a tubby commander with a short beard and twinkling eyes called Abdul Haq with whom I once used to eat pink ice-cream.

Twelve years had passed since I had last breathed the air of Afghanistan. In that time large parts of its capital had been turned to rubble in fighting, tens of thousands more people killed, the regime of the one-eyed mullah had locked away its women, hanged people from lampposts, smashed televisions with tanks and silenced its music, and for the last few years even the rains had stopped. Would I still find the cobalt blue of the mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif where the white doves flew, the smell of pines on the hot Wind of One Hundred and Twenty Days in Herat, the same burst of sweetness on the tongue from the grapes of Kandahar?

On my desk next to my computer, the holiday faces of my husband and son smiled out trustingly from a snapshot in a yellow frame and in my drawer were thick files of invoices for mortgage and utility bills, nursery fees and guarantees for all manner of electrical appliances. Did I really want to return to that unforgiving land of rocks and mountains stained by the blood of so much killing, or a place inside me when I was young and fearless with all my life and dreams ahead of me? And if I did rediscover that person would I destroy everything I had? The dreamcatcher seemed to know.

1 The Taliban Torturer (#ulink_8e789830-8cb6-5661-a4a0-20aaae4f5769)

‘The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.’

SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

THE INSTRUCTIONS FROM the commanding officer were clear.

‘You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people of food and water. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests, and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.’

I listened in horror. We were sitting at a table in the orchard of the Serena Hotel in Quetta in early October and the evenings were just starting to turn cold. There was a homely scent of apples from the trees all around and the sound of water trickling through narrow pebble-filled canals crisscrossing the orchard. Up above, the Milky Way cut a dusty path through a sky sprinkled with stars. I remembered long ago, on a chilly mountaintop in Paktia, a mujahid telling me that this was the trail left by the Prophet’s winged horse Buraq as he galloped towards the heavens.

Sitting at the table with me were Jamil Karzai, the young nephew of an old friend Hamid Karzai, who handed me a letter that I did not open till later, and three people Jamil had brought to talk to me. All three had been members of the Taliban but it was one in particular who was holding my attention.

His name was Mullah Khalil Ahmed Hassani and he was a small thin man who seemed anxious to be liked, with the pinched face and restless hands of one whose darkness hours are constantly haunted. His eyebrows were unusually highly arched under a gold-embroidered Kandahari skullcap that perched rather than fitted on his head, and as he spoke shadows played in the dark recesses of his face. He looked like a torture victim. Instead, as a member of the Taliban’s feared secret police, for the previous three and a half years he had been one of the perpetrators charged with carrying out the commanding officer’s instructions.

Aged thirty and married with a wife and a one-year-old baby daughter, he was a graduate in business studies and had been working as an accountant until he joined the Taliban. Like many in the movement, Khalil had been largely educated in Pakistan where he had grown up as a refugee, and two of his elder brothers had died fighting among the forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most fundamentalist of the seven mujaheddin leaders, in the jihad, or holy war, against the Russians. But his family was well off, owning lands and several houses in Kandahar to which they returned after the war, while he remained doing a degree at Peshawar University. Although he had introduced himself as Mullah Hassani, he explained with a nervous laugh, ‘I became a mullah just by joining the Taliban. I’m not a religious scholar.’

‘Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice,’ he continued. ‘In early 1998 I was working here in Quetta as accountant for a company trading dried fruit, almonds and pistachio nuts when I got a message that my grandfather, who was eighty-five, had been arrested by the Taliban in Kandahar and was being badly beaten and would probably die. They would only release him if we provided a male member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go.’

Many of Khalil’s friends had already joined the Taliban. Some because their families had been told their lands would be confiscated if they did not, though a few got round this by paying a bribe of $20 a month not to be conscripted, a huge amount in a country where the average salary is less than $200 a year. Others had been lured into its ranks with offers of money and Datsun two-door pick-ups with bumper bars – the vehicle of choice of the Taliban – which were provided to the leadership by smugglers and drug-barons in return for being able to ply their lucrative trade as Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer of opium

(#ulink_a6915f03-55e7-5d7d-8acf-a2612e47a3ca). The deliberate destruction of the irrigation channels by the Russians during their ten-year occupation meant that poppies were all that would grow in much of the country, and were the main crop in the south-western provinces of Helmand, Zabul and, to a lesser extent, Kandahar. Although the Taliban had banned the consumption of narcotics as un-Islamic, and in July 2000 had banned cultivation of opium poppies, the trade continued and the country remained one of the world’s major trafficking routes, known as the Golden Crescent.

Assigned to the secret police, Khalil patrolled the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. Initially he thought the Taliban were doing an effective job. ‘It had been a crazy situation after the Russians left,’ he explained. ‘In Kandahar warlords were selling everything, even stripping the telephone wires, kidnapping young girls and boys, robbing people and blocking the roads, and the Taliban seemed like good people who brought law and order.’

This was something I had heard over and over again. Afghanistan is roughly speaking, split into north and south by the Hindu Kush. To the north are mostly Persian and Turkic peoples, and to the south the Pashtuns, while Tajiks and Hazaras live in the mountains. By the time the Taliban emerged in 1994, ethnic and tribal divisions in a land awash with weaponry

(#ulink_933b7b32-2f1a-5ae6-a2be-ff5fbd9cb663) had turned the country into a shifting patchwork of fiefdoms run by warlords who switched sides with bewildering frequency.

The predominantly Tajik government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani controlled Kabul and the northeast, backed by commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famous Lion of the Panjshir, but was under siege from the forces of the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar based to the south, a man who had once stopped an interview with me because he could see my ankle. Herat and the three western-most provinces were ruled by Ismael Khan, an egocentric mujaheddin commander whose men wore black and white checked scarves, called him ‘Excellency’ and carried pictures of him with flowing black beard on a white horse. Mazar-i-Sharif and the six northern provinces were governed by the vodka-swilling Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum, who had been on the Soviet payroll during the jihad. Dostum’s 20,000-strong Jawzjani militia was so terrifying that they were known as galamjam or carpet-thieves, the ultimate Afghan insult. After the collapse of the Communists, he had subsequently allied with and betrayed just about every faction and at the time of the emergence of the Taliban had just switched his support from Rabbani to Hekmatyar. In the mountains of central Afghanistan, Hazaras ran the province of Bamiyan. A shura of bickering commanders in Jalalabad governed the three eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.

The worst situation was to the south of the Hindu Kush among Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, particularly around Kandahar. Gul Agha, the Governor, son of the late Haji Latif, a notorious bandit-leader turned mujaheddin commander, was said to have controlled no more than his office and the stretch of road outside. Small-time warlords and petty commanders had stripped the city of anything that could be sold for scrap and set up their own checkpoints.

Everyone talked of the chains across the roads, five on the main street of Kandahar, fifty just on the two-hour sixty-five-mile stretch between Spin Boldak and Kandahar, each manned by different warlords demanding money. Businessmen and truckers were paying far more in bribes to transport things than the value of the goods themselves. Wali Jan, sardar of the Noorzai tribe, and owner of a petrol station and one of the principal bazaars in Kandahar, whom I met at his marble-floored house in Quetta, told me he had happily given money to Mullah Omar. ‘It had been a terrible situation,’ he explained. ‘The roads were full of dacoits and we had to pay a fortune to transport our stuff and our market was full of thieves.’

Then there were the rapes. No one slept safely in their homes as young girls and boys were kidnapped and violated, causing many parents to stop sending them to school. According to Taliban legend, the whole movement was sparked off in the spring of 1994 when a commander paraded on his tank around town a young boy that he had taken as his bride after a dispute with another commander who had also wanted to sodomise the boy. Another version was that a commander had abducted two young sisters from the village of Sanghisar where Mullah Omar preached at the small local mosque, taken them to his military camp and repeatedly gang-raped them. Mullah Omar was said to have gathered thirty men and attacked, hanging the commander from the barrel of his own tank.

Later interviews with some of the founding members of the Taliban, as well as villagers from Sanghisar and officers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which gave military and financial support to the movement, cast doubt on both these versions and made it clear that it had been planned for some time with active recruitment going on among madrassa students in Baluchistan. However war-weary the population and eager for change, it seems inconceivable that a bunch of illiterate small-town mullahs and religious students could have masterminded the often sophisticated military offensives that saw them capture ninety percent of the country within four years, not to mention economic measures such as flooding the currency markets of Mazar-i-Sharif with counterfeit Afghani notes to destroy confidence in the local administration. All of this pointed to the involvement of the ISI, which for years had been trying to install a sympathetic government in Kabul. General Nasirullah Babar, Interior Minister in the government of Benazir Bhutto who was ruling Pakistan at the time the movement emerged, publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘our boys’. Whatever the truth there is no doubt that initially Mullah Omar and his men were seen as noble figures simply intent on restoring law and order to the country, then to hand over control to someone else.

‘Mullah Omar told me we don’t want chairs, you tribal leaders can have those, we just want food for our men,’ said Wali Jan. ‘For the four days it took them to capture Kandahar our nan shops gave all the bread they produced to them. We also gave them watermelons. Then they said they wanted to take Herat which was good for us as we import through Iran and wanted that road cleared so we gave them money and they captured Herat and again Mullah Omar told me don’t worry, we don’t want chairs. They also said we don’t want taxes, just zakat, the Islamic tax, just 2.5%. But they cheated us for they took the chairs and then they started taxes, demanding more and more money.’

Patrolling the streets of Kandahar in his black Taliban turban, Mullah Khalil Hassani also felt cheated. Throughout 1998 the leadership began issuing more and more radical edicts and his duties changed. Instead of searching for criminals or subversives, the night patrols were tasked with finding people watching videos, listening to music, playing cards or chess, or keeping birds, something that had always been popular in Kandahar where people would train so-called Judas pigeons to lure birds from other people’s flocks and capture them. Men sporting beards that did not meet the regulation length of being long enough to squeeze a fist around it and still have some beard protruding at the bottom, were to be arrested and beaten, as were any women who dared venture outside the house in squeaky shoes, white shoes, or shoes that clicked. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

One of Wali Jan’s market stalls was burnt down for selling Malaysian soap because printed on the green and yellow packets was a silhouette of a woman; another for stocking washing powder with a photograph of a housewife and children. ‘It was a nightmare – the police were always confiscating food because they had pictures of people on them,’ he recalled. ‘We had to close down the photo booths and video shops, and could no longer sell music, only the Taliban Top Ten.’ According to him, the Taliban’s favourite singer was a man called Siraji, who intoned monotonous war chants inciting people into battle with lyrics such as:

This is our house, the home of lions and tigers We will beat everyone who attacks us We are the defenders of our great country.

‘They banned everything,’ he continued. ‘The only entertainment was public executions. The only safe activity was sleeping. Once I asked Mullah Omar what people were supposed to do for enjoyment and he said, “walk in gardens and look at flowers”. But the funny thing is after he took over there were five years of drought and everything died so there weren’t even flowers.’

‘Was there a list of forbidden things?’ I asked Khalil. ‘Not exactly a list,’ he replied. ‘Most of the things we knew and notices would come round with new ones as well as orders, such as to keep our turbans straight.’ He thought for a while then asked for a sheet of paper from my notebook and wrote down the following, adding to them throughout our conversation as he remembered more. I later had it translated.

1. All men to attend prayers in mosques five times daily.

2. No woman allowed outside the home unless accompanied by a mahram (close male relative such as a father, brother or husband).

3. Women not allowed to buy from male shopkeepers.

4. Women must be covered by burqa.

5. Any woman showing her ankles must be whipped.

6. Women must not talk or shake hands with men.

7. Ban on laughing in public. No stranger should hear a woman’s voice.

8. Ban on wearing shoes with heels or that make any noise as no stranger should hear a woman’s footsteps.

9. Ban on cosmetics. Any woman with painted nails should have her fingers cut off.

10. No woman allowed to play sports or enter a sports club.

11. Ban on clothes in ‘sexually attracting colours’, (basically anything other than light blue or mustard).

12. Ban on flared trousers, even under a burqa.

13. Ban on women washing clothes in rivers or any public place.

14. Ban on women appearing on the balconies of their houses. All windows were supposed to be painted so women could not be seen from outside their homes.

15. No one allowed to listen to music.

16. No television or video allowed.

17. No playing of cards.