Opium Nation Read online

  “It’s a shop with seven or eight people,” Asif explains. “We have an informant inside who tells us the shopkeeper is selling dope. Today we’re finally ready to do a raid on the shop. That entire bazaar has an underground network of small dealers and we want the small dealers so we can capture the bigger ones.”

  The general and I have been meeting for weeks and discussing the perils of the drug trade. It has taken time for him to open up to me. But recently Asif, a former math and physics teacher, had a scolding from his bosses to be more discreet about the level of corruption in the government and the involvement of high officials in narcotics. He’s obeying, but with pent-up frustration. “I can’t talk about it,” he says with a sigh when I ask if his team is wasting their time arresting culprits who will simply pay a bribe to be freed again.

  Robust in size and character, he seems to genuinely care about his team and his job, spending hours at the office or on operations. He wears big watches and earth-tone suits and carries a pistol hidden beneath his jacket. He treats his team like his children, especially the women. Protecting them seems at times to be more important to him than confiscating narcotics and capturing criminals. With each meeting, we form a bond, and he speaks to me in the same fatherly tone I hear him using with the NIU women.

  “Fariba Jan,” he says in Farsi with an endearing Pashto accent, “you can’t show yourself to these men, because they can hurt you if they see you on the street without our protection. You must stay to the side and pretend you know nothing.”

  I nod my head in agreement. An hour later, in a striped black pant suit and black head scarf, I am squished in a Russian Jeep among Asif, a white-bearded prosecutor who’s here to witness the bust and gather evidence, and several uniformed and plainclothes officers with AK-47s. There is an informant on site who will purchase opium from the shopkeeper and whom the agents will arrest while in the act. We drive toward the Baharistan bazaar.

  Asif receives a call from the narc near the shop. He responds in Pashto and then tells the driver to go slower. He looks at me and says, “The owner we want to bust has left the shop and left his young son in charge.” He looks worried.

  “So what happens now?” I ask.

  “We wait and see,” he responds, annoyed.

  The prosecutor, who does not want to be named, tells me he’s anxious for the special counternarcotics court to open. “It’s the only way we can keep these guys in jail,” he says. “In the meantime, we capture them by day and they’re out by night.”

  His candidness surprises me. The group in this Jeep do their job knowing that their efforts are futile. “We do it for the income and for the hope that things could improve,” the prosecutor explains.

  I look at the men in the Jeep and wonder if any of them is a double agent, taking cuts from drug barons while arresting the smaller dealers. In Afghanistan, civil servants and government officials are perceived as guilty (not by the law but by the people) until proven innocent. Whether this is unfair pessimism or justified doubt, I have been indoctrinated here to distrust anyone in power.

  Asif receives another call, and the driver speeds up. He drops me off a couple of hundred yards away. The uniformed and plainclothes agents jump out around the corner from the shop. I begin walking toward the shop hoping no one recognizes me. I’ve bought my groceries and sweets in this bazaar. I had no idea the shops were riddled with drug pushers.

  A year before, I still lived in the Karte Parwan neighborhood, which is perched on top of a hill, with angled streets that remind me of San Francisco. It is ten degrees colder than the rest of the capital. The two-story house rented by the aid organization I work for looks kempt and swanky from the street. It has four bedrooms, a large living room, a dining space, three bathrooms, and a kitchen awkwardly situated upstairs. We also have water tainted with feces, electricity for only a couple of hours a night, and no proper heating. In the winter, my gas heater catches fire and is destroyed. I have to wear four layers of clothing and sleep with three blankets to keep warm. The olive oil and bottled drinking water we keep on the kitchen counter freeze from the below-zero Kabul temperatures.

  Pajhwok, the Afghan news agency I’m working for, is in its infancy and is supervised by a British NGO. The NGO has spent thousands of dollars installing barbed wire and safeguarding the house and has built a wooden booth for a guard to protect us around the clock. The guard booth in other foreigner-occupied houses is outside the walls of the house, but ours was built inside our small front yard. That means my two housemates and I have little privacy. Before the wars the neighborhood was considered upscale. Now it is filled with commanders loyal to the late Massoud and their kin from the Panjshir Valley. Plenty of children with white skin and green eyes, features common to Panjshiris, play on the street. At the end of our block is a mosque with a green-lit minaret, and every Friday, the resident mullah gives a sermon damning hedonism and excess. The message is typical of every sermon I have heard in half a dozen Muslim countries I’ve visited. I don’t take it too seriously—in the beginning.

  My previous trips to Afghanistan took me to Herat, where I stayed with relatives, but in Kabul, I live without any family. I’ve moved to the capital with hope for change and a job that gives me a view into the lives of moderate and somewhat educated men and women who want to be part of a more liberal and democratic Afghanistan. One of the women I’m training in journalism is Lailuma Sadid. She’s a twenty-five-year-old fashion diva and one of the hardest working reporters on staff. She has lived through the years of war without ever leaving the country. With chic short hair and a petite, well-proportioned figure, Lailuma wears clothes that rile some of the more conservative men in the office—tight jeans and a head scarf that sits more on her shoulders than around her head. This wife and mother scoffs at the men who disapprove of her appearance. “If my husband doesn’t mind my clothes, it’s none of your business,” she tells one of the male editors who openly criticizes her. Behind every woman testing boundaries in Afghanistan seems to be a man who supports her. Qudrat, Lailuma’s husband, takes care of their five-year-old daughter and the household. He’s a taxi driver, and his hours are flexible. They’re a rare modern couple—in my eyes, a model for urban Afghans.

  One evening a bomb explodes, shaking the windows of the news agency in the new city of Kabul. Lailuma is the only reporter in the newsroom, with a few of the foreign trainers. Five months pregnant with her second child and wearing three-inch heels, she jumps into one of the agency vans with me and a couple of other trainers and we head to the bomb site, where the police are already clearing the dead. The roads are blocked; vehicles cannot drive through. She and I must run half a mile through shattered glass and debris to get close to the site of the explosion. The smoke from the blast is smoldering and people are running in all directions. Lailuma writes down what she observes and holds out her tape recorder to anyone willing to talk. It’s the first time she’s covering a bomb explosion, even though she has lived through dozens of them in her lifetime.

  Lailuma was born shortly before the Soviet invasion and has no memories of a peaceful Afghanistan. But she’s determined to improve the country’s conditions, particularly in women’s rights and freedom of the press. “We used to think our lives were in someone else’s hands,” she tells me. “Now I think I’m a new woman. I have the right to say what I want and do what I want.” It’s Afghans like her who inject me with optimism.

  My plan in Kabul is to live like a local woman and respect the culture. I do not go out too often at night. I dress conservatively, and I fast during Ramadan. But as time passes and I become a resident instead of a visitor, I lose tolerance for the misogyny and traditionalism. I realize that I cannot be a local Afghan woman no matter how hard I try. I talk back whenever a man on the street gives me a lustful stare or makes an inappropriate comment. One afternoon my Indian friend Aunohita and I hail a taxi. The driver notices my red-painted toenails beneath the straps of my summer sandals. He assumes I’m a foreigner an
d requests an exorbitant fare to take us to the Intercontinental Hotel, his eyes traveling up and down my fully covered body.

  “That’s too much money,” I tell him. “I’ll pay you fifty rupia [one dollar] or we can get another taxi.”

  “Fine, get in,” he says.

  As he drives, he doesn’t look at the road. He keeps turning to stare at my friend and me.

  “Where did you learn to speak Farsi so well?” he asks, revealing his yellow teeth in a sordid smile.

  “I’m Afghan. Can you please look at the road and not us,” I demand.

  He’s offended by my abruptness and begins to careen around corners and speed through the traffic in his clunker. I’m frightened but I don’t show it. I ignore him and chat with Aunohita in English. He brakes suddenly in front of our destination, and we get out. I throw the money at him, and he curses at me as he drives away.

  Living in Afghanistan forces me to fight the patriarchy and to rebel, enjoying the freedoms that other expatriates do, but I pay the price with constant harassment.

  The families in Karte Parwan know one another and do not like having foreign occupants in the neighborhood. When they find out that there’s an Afghan girl living with a British man, my sixty-year-old housemate, Martin, it arouses anger and suspicion. One night Martin and a couple of American male friends who have come over for dinner are lured by the mild summer weather up to the roof to have tea. Women are dancing in the courtyard of one of the neighboring houses in celebration of a wedding. Out of curiosity, Martin and the other men look down at the celebration. I know this could have grave consequences and ask them to step away. It’s too late.

  The next day, one of the unscrupulous former mujahideen commanders in the neighborhood, Arif, knocks on our door and tells our guard that if the men ever go up to the roof again he will blow up our house. When I go to work that day, Qadeer, Pajhwok’s operations director, calls me in to his office.

  “Your neighbors have complained to the mullah at the mosque about you living with Martin,” Qadeer says in a tone sympathetic to my neighbors. “They don’t understand how an Afghan girl could live with a foreign man like this. It’s dishonorable to them. I told the mullah that they should consider you as a foreigner, not an Afghan. They don’t care about the other woman living with you, because she is American. It’s dangerous for you. I’m not asking you to change your lifestyle, but please be aware of the things that offend people.”

  I’m livid, but I have been expecting the official complaint. I knew that having male friends over for dinner, living with a man not related to me, and working for a foreign aid organization were all taboo for me in this neighborhood. I pushed the boundaries as far as I could, but now I have to stand back and be more practical. Local Afghans are confused by Afghan girls who come from abroad, because they do not know what standards to hold them up to—they give foreign women the same freedoms as men, and local Afghan women have their own set of stifling rules. But girls like me are an enigma, and often the confusion over this turns into hostility.

  We stop going up to the roof, and our dinner parties become few and far between. My Westernized lifestyle only hurts local Afghan women, because their neighbors will accuse them of becoming loose from working with women like me. It’s not my battle to fight; it’s Lailuma’s. Local women must struggle against the rules that confine them. Only then will the changes be considered legitimate and permanent. Women like me are a passing phase, not yet part of the mosaic of Afghanistan. Our feminism is out of place and still too foreign to take root.

  After my assignment with Pajhwok is complete, I move to another neighborhood.

  From across the street at the Baharistan bazaar I watch the NIU snitch buy a cassette from a shopkeeper. Then the NIU police surround the small music shop and Asif goes inside. He comes out with the shopkeeper a few minutes later. The police climb into the Russian Jeep with the shopkeeper, Asif, and the prosecutor. I take a cab back to the compound where the shopkeeper will be questioned.

  Fatah, the shopkeeper and an accused drug dealer, sits on a chair in Asif’s office and nervously crosses one leg over the other several times. He cracks his knuckles with his uncuffed hands as Asif writes something in a report. The shopkeeper’s pupils are pinned and his hair is long and disheveled. He wears sneakers and a Pakistani pirahan tomban that is too large for his gaunt build. The snitch bought two dollars worth of opium from him. The NIU agents say they also found drugs wrapped around his left leg under his tomban. One of the uniformed agents brings in the two packets of opium and five sticks of hashish discovered on him. They also found about $120 in his shop. He looks at me like a puppy dog, as if pleading for forgiveness. “I’ll cooperate however you want. I have eleven kids at home; eight are two of my brothers’ orphans. I’m the breadwinner for all of them. Give me three days and I’ll find you the original seller,” he begs Asif.

  Asif ignores him and continues to take notes. Fatah asks if he can make a phone call to his son to tell him he’s okay. “Yes, wait a minute,” Asif responds cordially.

  “How did you start selling drugs?” I ask the man.

  “All the music sellers in Baharistan sell. A man on a bicycle named Jabar comes and sells us the drugs. I opened my shop six months ago and I was an addict. So I began selling while smoking at the same time.

  “I charged five dollars for five grams of opium. What I make feeds the kids and my wife. One of my brothers died in a rocket attack during the mujahideen attacks, and one of them died of a disease. I have three of my own kids and the others are theirs. I lived in Pakistan for many years and when we moved back, I opened the cassette shop and wasn’t making enough money with the music. This is the only business that’s available for someone like me to make money.”

  I feel sorry for the man and wonder if all the effort and manpower by the NIU over such a small dealer is worth it. It seems hard to believe that he knows or has evidence against the bigger traffickers. Fatah’s arrest only hurts a family of thirteen. What is the point of counternarcotics when the millions of aid dollars spent on it are producing more drugs and more drug dealers? I begin to feel the same skepticism that is creeping into the Afghan psyche in Kabul. The initial faith I had in the new government and its foreign backers is dissipating as I watch Afghanistan fall again. But I refuse to let the negativity take over.

  By May 2005 the increasing population in Kabul—villagers leaving the countryside en masse in search of work in the capital—is taxing the city’s resources. Power and water are rationed, and the worsening pollution is causing some Afghans to wear surgical masks as they ride to work on their bicycles. Of the eight million workers in the country, three million are unemployed and many flock to the capital for jobs. Prices for food and fuel are rising, parallel with crime rates. The piled-up garbage and the sewage in open ditches paint a vivid picture of what Kabul has become. The once-serene, green, and clean capital is turning into a chaotic urban sprawl like its neighboring cities Tehran and Karachi. When the U.S.-led coalition threw out the Taliban in 2001, Afghans dreamed of a pristine Kabul where food would be plentiful, jobs available, and the streets safe. It’s now four years later, and the country is headed backward. “You smell the terrible odor emanating from the streets here?” a jewelry store owner tells me as I look at his ruby necklaces. “That’s how much our new government stinks, and so do the Americans and British supporting them.”

  His metaphor demonstrates the growing resentment against the corruption being unveiled in the Karzai government. From bribery to drug dealing, many government officials and foreign contractors are profiting from the billions of dollars in aid money that’s pouring in to Afghanistan. In the United States, Afghanistan is absent in the headlines as the Iraq war rages. Afghans’ discontent is overshadowed by comparisons that Iraq is the losing battle and Afghanistan is the model war.

  The international community is focused on the five-year Bonn Agreement that cobbled together the Karzai-led government in Germany in 2001. The plan is
being implemented on time. Seventy percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the country’s first democratic elections in 2004, and the next step is for the Afghan government to write and approve a constitution through a grand assembly with international support. Then come parliamentary elections. The aid community and returning Afghans like me see the implementation of the Bonn Agreement as a sign of progress, despite the setbacks. “It takes time to make sweeping changes in a country that has been at war for decades. We can’t expect immediate results,” I tell another journalist friend who voices pessimism about the government. Meanwhile, the Taliban and al Qaeda have regrouped, retrained, and returned with ferocity from across the Pakistan border. Their new and effective weapon: suicide bombings. They do not have local support in most of the country yet, but the graft, the return of the warlords, and the lack of jobs will soon send more Afghans into the arms of the insurgency.

  The biggest sector of the economy is still illicit narcotics. And one of the biggest accused kingpins is General Asif’s boss, General Daud Daud, the former chief of counternarcotics. (Daud was killed in a suicide attack orchestrated by the Taliban in Takhar in May 2011.)

  In June 2005 the counternarcotics highway police (separate from NIU) intercept at least 183 kilos of pure heroin on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad. The drugs belong to Sayyed Jan, who shows the police a signed letter from their boss Daud addressed to all government security forces in Lashkargah, Helmand: “Haji Sayyed Jan from the interior ministry has thirty people with him and is conducting an operation against drug trafficking and narcotics. He has the decree and permission to go ahead with his duties. Please assist him and do not stop him.” Documents such as this letter imply that Daud writes protection letters for traffickers, who give him a cut of their profits. Those who have worked with him in the Afghan government say he receives $50,000 for each shipment and $100,000 for each protection letter. The antidrug czar denies any involvement in the drug trade.