The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

One night he was put on watch and saw a truck of sheep and goats coming through the lines from Northern Alliance territory so he jumped in and got to Kabul and from there back to Kandahar. There he was arrested and put in jail for eight days and interrogated but managed to get out to Quetta through the intervention of some relatives who were high-ranking Taliban members.

Since leaving the Taliban, Khalil had been living back in Quetta with his wife and baby daughter, and was looking for work. Although he insisted that the Taliban had become an organization ‘in name only’, he feared for his life and I wondered why he had taken the enormous risk of speaking to me. ‘I want people to understand,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I have done terrible things and the only way I can make up for it is to tell the world the truth about these people.’

Kabul, September24 2001

Respected Mr Jamil Karzai

Salam alay kum

I hope you and the rest of your family will be alright. I received your letter and I informed other female members of ours, Farishta, Najeba, Sadaf and Maryam about your request to write to a lady journalist who writes for the Sunday Telegraph of Britain.

Respected Karzai, we here really appreciate what you do for the new generation of Afghanistan and we are really worried about your life too. Please be careful.

Here is the letter for Miss Christina Lamb.

Dear Christina

Jamil Karzai has written about you that you are a nice kind beautiful and helpful lady and has asked us, specially me to write a letter about our life under the Taliban regime and I hope this will help you outside understand the feelings of an educated Afghan female who must now live under a burqa.

My name is Fatema, this is my real name but please I ask you to use this name of mine Marri, as what we are doing is dangerous. I’m thirty years old and live in a three-roomed flat with my family on a big estate, it’s called Microrayon. I was born here in Kabul and I graduated from the twelfth class of Hishai Durrani High School, our biggest girls’ school. I speak Dari, Pashto and English. I think you are surprised I know English but my father was a diplomat and my mother an English teacher. My mother went to university in India. So don’t worry.

I know from our friend that you have a kind husband and a beautiful son and you travel the world reporting and meeting people. I dream of a life like that. It’s funny we live under the same small sky yet it seems we live 500 years apart.

You see us now in our burqas like strange insects in the dust, our heads down, but it wasn’t always this way. I do not remember much before the Russian invasion as I was only eight when they came and I felt bad then when I saw the soldiers with their white faces and hair because my parents said they had made slaves of us but even at that time we still went to school. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government. We went for picnics and parties, wore jeans and short skirts and I thought I would go to university like my mother and work for my living.

I know in the villages many schools had been destroyed in the war but here in Kabul we were lucky. Only when the Taliban came were all the girls’ schools and university closed. When the mujaheddin came to Kabul my school was closed for a year because of all the fighting which was very bad particularly here in Microrayon and we were the first line of battle, but then I finished school and became a teacher. I particularly liked science and wanted to go to university to study science but there was no money because my father had lost his job.

When the Taliban came to Kabul, it was September 1996, they told us all to stay at home. They announced it on the radio just like they announced we all had to wear burqas. I had never worn one before, they were something from the village, and it was like not being able to breathe or see, just seeing in front through that small square like a cage, and in the summer it is so hot and the sun blinds you. I fell over twice the first day.

In our house behind all the burqas and shalwar kamiz is a red silk party dress, my mother’s from the time when the king was in power and my father in the foreign ministry. Sometimes I hold it up against me and imagine dancing but it is a lost world. Now we must wear clothes that make us invisible and cannot even wear heels. One of my friends was beaten with cable for wearing white shoes because the Taliban said, ‘how dare you wear the colour of our flag’, and another because they said they could hear her shoes click on the pavement.

You might think we women are doing nothing but my friends and I struggle for the rights of Afghan women working secretly here for the Afghan Women’s League, trying to educate our women and young girls. Some of our members make nan bread and distribute it to widows, there are so many widows from this long war, you see them in all streets in the city begging in their torn clothes but the Taliban beat them and say they are not allowed out without mahram, that’s what we call men relatives like a husband or father.

My sister and I hold secret English and science classes in our house. It is hard as all the time we fear someone might report us and we cannot get books. Our students pay a little and we use it for firewood to keep warm. We do not even have a blackboard. We tell them do not bring bags and sometimes we stop for weeks because we have heard the Taliban are onto us. We thought about contacting an NGO but we are worried the Taliban would find out. Some other schools have been found and the teachers beaten.

We have small rebellions. Maybe you do not know we are forbidden to wear make-up under the burqa but I have a red lipstick. One of my friends runs a secret beauty salon in her bedroom.

In my family I am the eldest and apart from my sister Latifa, I have two brothers. One is a tailor, the other still a student but in school now all he learns is the Koran and the Hadith, not science or foreign languages. Science was my favourite subject. I wanted to be a science teacher.

Life here is very miserable. We have no rights at all and we have asked many times other countries of the world for help but they have been silent. Now we heard about this attack on the towers in America with many people dead and my father says the Americans will come and remove the Taliban but we do not dare hope. I wonder, maybe the world will think all Afghans are terrorists and we are not. It is the Arabs, who drive around in their Datsuns with black windows and live in big houses behind high walls in Wazir Akbar Khan and buy their foods in tins in the import shops in Chicken Street. If you saw how we lived, you would know we cannot be terrorists, we are the forgotten people.

We do not have schools, the doors of education are closed on all, especially us. I don’t know if we will ever go to school again. We cannot paint or listen to music. The Taliban ran their tanks over all the televisions.

We asked the world, are we not human beings? Do we not deserve to live in peace? Can we not have rights as women in other countries?

I do not know what you want me to write to you. If I start writing I will fill all the paper and my eyes will fill with tears because in these seven years of Taliban no one has asked us to write about our lives. In my mind I make a picture of you and your family. I wonder if you drive a car, if you go out with friends to the cinema and restaurants and dance at parties. Do you play loud music and swim in lakes? One day I would like to see and I would also like to show you a beautiful place in my country with mountains and streams but not now while we must be hidden. Maybe our worlds will always be too far apart.

Marri

(#ulink_2a2d5a0e-5526-541e-bb4f-20ab46c14a70) According to the US State Department, Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2000 was 3,656 tonnes, 72 percent of the world’s total, compared to 31 percent in 1985. Production fell in 2001 after the Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies, but in 2002, following the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan became the world’s biggest opium producer again.

(#ulink_7a30461a-5cd5-564f-9b58-fc7470dcb391) The combination of US and Soviet aid probably made Afghanistan the world’s largest recipient of personal weapons during the 1980s, according to figures from the 1991 SIPRI Yearbook on World Armaments, with total weapon imports greater than those of Iraq. For more details see Barnett Rubin.

(#ulink_b97747d9-5767-5460-bd52-15b4a0fbc4be) Population figures in Afghanistan can only be estimates and are all hotly disputed by the various ethnic groupings. The CIA World Fact Book 2001 puts the population at 26.8 million of which 38 percent are Pashtun, 25 percent Tajik, 19 percent Hazara, 6 percent Uzbek and 12 percent other.

(#ulink_42cd3331-1d54-57a3-9368-737d8530b9aa) For more details see the Human Rights Watch report of November 1998 – ‘Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif’.

2 Mullahs on Motorbikes (#ulink_4b633a89-75ba-5e81-8945-f2199d4664ed)

Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over

SIR OLAF CAROE

TRAVELLING IN AFGHANISTAN was like wandering through the shadows of shattered things. Khalil Hassani’s story had meant more to me than he realised for Afghanistan had left its own dark place in my mind. When he spoke of Kandahar, I pictured a land the colour of dust, its old caravan trails littered with burnt-out tanks and dotted with bombed terracotta villages which from a distance resembled the ruins of some forgotten civilisation and probably looked little different to when Alexander the Great founded the city in 330 BC giving it his name, Iskandar in Arabic. But I saw something else too.

The first time I went to Kandahar I was on the back of a mullah’s motorbike and thought it the most desolate place on earth. Nothing but tufts of coarse grass grew on the stony plains and the distant mountains were barren and flesh-coloured. The turban wound round my head offered scant protection from the ancient grit driven into my eyes and mouth on a scorching desert wind that was said by Kandaharis to be so hot as to grill a fish held on an upturned palm.

It was 1988 and the giggling mullahs on motorbikes who taught me to tie a turban and shared their rations of fried okra and stale nan bread with me under Soviet tank-fire, would later become the Taliban. No one had heard of the Taliban then, it was just a word in Pashto that meant ‘seekers of knowledge’ or religious students. And not many journalists went to Kandahar in those days. The journey to Afghanistan’s second biggest city was complicated and dangerous, starting off from the remote desert town of Quetta where the earth seemed in a constant state of tremor and to which flights were sporadic.

Most reporters covered the war from Peshawar where there was a five-star hotel and the seven mujaheddin parties fighting the Russians had their headquarters, making it easy to arrange trips ‘inside’, as we called getting into Afghanistan. There was an American Club where one could drink Budweisers, eat Oreo Cookie ice-cream and listen to middle-aged male correspondents in US Army jackets with bloodstains and charred bullet holes on the back hold court with stories of conflict and ‘skirt’ from Vietnam to El Salvador. Their eyes had seen so much that they saw nothing, they knew the name and sound of every weapon ever invented, their faces were on the leathery side of rugged and even at breakfast there was Jim Beam on their breath. One of them wore hearing aids which he informed me loudly was because of ‘bang bang’; most had children in various places but never carried their photographs, and all of them went to the Philippines for R and R.

The Kandahar desert had been turned into a battlefield.

It was different for me. I was a young girl in a place where women were regarded as property along with gold and land – the three zs of the Pashtuns, zan, zar and zamin – and kept hidden away behind curtained doorways. The closest I had ever come to war was doing a report for Central Television News in Birmingham on a cannon used in the Battle of Waterloo that ‘Local Man’ had rescued from the sea. I found the weapon names confusing with all the acronyms and numbers and for a long time couldn’t even tell the difference between incoming and outgoing fire. I was young enough to believe I could change the world by writing about the injustices that I saw and foolish enough to think that I could be a witness without bearing any responsibility. What I knew of the Afghans was a romanticised vision distilled from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and various nineteenth-century British accounts such as the first by Mountstuart Elphinstone who went out to parley with the king on behalf of the East India Company in 1809 and wrote, ‘their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, laborious and prudent.’

After having taken various ‘resistance tours’ inside from Peshawar, I decided to go to Kandahar largely because I liked the name. Alexander the Great had conquered many peoples and founded a number of cities on his long march from Macedonia towards India, most of which bore some variation of his name. But there was something magical about the name Kan-dahar, which pronounced with the stress on the first syllable and a long breath at the end, seemed to convey a sense of longing for the place.

Kandahar was where everything had started. Under the shimmering turquoise dome that dominates the sand-blown city lies the body of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the young Kandahari warrior who in 1747 became Afghanistan’s first king. The mausoleum is covered in deep blue and white tiles behind a small grove of trees, one of which is said to cure toothache, and is a place of pilgrimage. In front of it is a small mosque with a marble vault containing one of the holiest relics in the Islamic World, a kherqa, the Sacred Cloak of Prophet Mohammed that was given to Ahmad Shah by Murad Beg, the Emir of Bokhara. The Sacred Cloak is kept locked away, taken out only at times of great crisis

(#ulink_594485ea-d185-5ce7-ac68-5c1277222af4) but the mausoleum is open and there is a constant line of men leaving their sandals at the door and shuffling through to marvel at the surprisingly long marble tomb and touch the glass case containing Ahmad Shah’s brass helmet. Before leaving they bend to kiss a length of pink velvet said to be from his robe. It bears the unmistakable scent of jasmine.

In a land of war, the tomb of Ahmad Shah is a peaceful place. Only the men with stumps for legs and burqa-clad war widows begging at its steps hint at the violence and treachery which has stalked Afghanistan since its birth as a nation-state, founded on treasure stolen from a murdered emperor. Part of that treasure was the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond, then said to be worth enough to maintain the whole world for a day and now among the Crown Jewels under twenty-four-hour guard in the Tower of London, stunningly beautiful but blighted by an ancient Hindu curse that the wearer will rule the world but if male will suffer a terrible misfortune.

A member of the war-like Pashtun tribe of Abdalis, Ahmad Shah was commander of the bodyguard of Nadir Shah, the great Persian conqueror who in 1738 had captured Kandahar from the Ghilzai, another Pashtun tribe and traditional rivals of the Abdalis. Nadir Shah moved east to take Jalalabad, Peshawar, Lahore and finally Delhi, where angered by locals throwing stones at him, he ordered a bloodbath in which 20,000 died. He left laden with treasures of the Moghuls including the fabled Peacock Throne of Emperor Shah Jahan, creator of the Taj Mahal, which was solid gold with a canopy held up by twelve emerald pillars, on top of which were two peacocks studded with diamonds, rubies and emeralds. Among the precious jewels he packed on his camels was the Koh-i-Noor, named after his exclamation on first seeing the 186-carat stone, describing it as ‘koh-i-noor!’ or ‘mountain of light’.

After India, Nadir Shah travelled west, conquering as he went, but with the Koh-i-Noor in his turban, he became more and more ruthless, convinced that everyone was trying to kill him, even his favourite son Raza Quli whom he had blinded. One night in 1747, travelling on yet another military campaign, someone stole into Nadir Shah’s tent and stabbed him to death. Ahmad Shah fled the camp with his 4000-strong cavalry and headed to Kandahar, taking much of the emperor’s treasury, including the cursed Koh-i-Noor.

Freed from Persian domination, the Abdalis held a jirga, a tribal assembly of elders and religious leaders to decide on a ruler. After nine days of discussion they settled upon the twenty-five-year-old Ahmad Shah, partly for his charisma, partly because he was a Saddozai, from the tribe’s most distinguished line, partly because a holy man stood up and said he should be, and largely because he had a large army and lots of treasure. A sheaf of wheat was placed on his head as a crown.

Ahmad Shah’s affectation of wearing a pearl earring from the looted Moghul treasures led his subjects to call him Durr-i-Durran, Pearl of Pearls, and the royal family became known as the Durrani clan. He set up a shura or tribal council to govern the country, and, quickly realising that the best way to control Pashtun tribes was to indulge their taste for warfare and plunder, he used Nadir Shah’s booty and a succession of military adventures to keep them in check. Helped by the fact that to the west Persia was in disarray after Nadir Shah’s death, and to the east the Moghul Empire was crumbling, Ahmad Shah ended up carving out the second greatest Muslim empire after the Ottoman Empire, taking Kabul, Peshawar, Attock, Lahore, and eventually Delhi.

Never the most modest of men, he had coins minted with the inscription, ‘the Commandment came down from the peerless Almighty to Ahmad the King: Strike coins of silver and gold from the back of fish to the moon’.

After his successes in India, Ahmad Shah moved west to capture Herat which was still under Persian rule, then north of the Hindu Kush to bring under his control the Hazara of Bamiyan, the Turkmen of Asterabad, the Uzbek of Balkh and Kunduz, and the Tajik of Khanabad and Badakshan to create Afghanistan as it is today. But he had to keep returning to India where his territories were threatened by the Hindu Maratha armies from the south. Invading India for a fourth time, he acquired Kashmir and Sindh.

Yet he always missed his homeland. A deeply religious man and warrior-poet, he wrote of Kandahar:

Whatever countries I conquer in the worldI can never forget your beautiful gardensWhen I remember the summits of your beautiful mountainsI forget the splendour of the Delhi throne.