Opium Nation Read online

  On many nights, I escape my apartment to stay with friends, foreign consultants who live in one of the houses in the high-class neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan. They work for an American company assigned by the U.S. government to revamp the Afghan financial system. The company rents eight houses, paying up to $8,000 a month for the house used by the highest-ranking company official. The area has become a fortress for international consultants, diplomats, and the American military, with nearly all the streets blocked from normal traffic for safety reasons. Inside the homes, aid money has paid for all the luxuries of Western life, including twenty-four-hour electricity provided by truck-size generators, a cook to prepare three meals a day, and access to satellite television and the Internet. I’m not selfless enough to avoid these luxuries and indulge in the amenities offered at the house.

  On the first anniversary of Idrees’s death, I visit his family again in Khair Khana. The twins are playing in the yard with their older sister. The plants have been removed from the yard. Hellay takes me to the same guest room, and this time I meet Zaki, Idrees’s younger brother, and Idrees’s widow, Tahmina. They stand up to greet me.

  Zaki seems anxious to talk. He is studying Sharia law at the university and will graduate in a month. He wants to get a job and contribute to his family income. They have another brother, in Austria, who sends some money, but it’s not enough for the thirteen members of the family. Their youngest brother is in high school. The family still receives the $200 monthly income with which Idrees used to support them. They can maintain their lifestyle for another few months, until that income stops. The American embassy and the Afghan government have promised to compensate the family with $20,000 for Idrees’s sacrifice. (The financial loss has affected the family the least.)

  Tahmina, a thin, petite woman, sits cross-legged, her twin toddlers circling her. She doesn’t speak Farsi, but even when Zaki asks her a question in Pashto, she mumbles a barely audible answer. She stares at the wall as Zaki, an earnest man with solemn eyes and a beard, shares the details of Idrees’s life and death. Zaki was the first to find out that his brother had been murdered and the last to see him alive.

  “That night he left for the compound, I walked him to the door and locked the gate behind him. I said the travel prayer for him to return home safe. Four days later, somebody came from NIU to the door and asked for me. He said Idrees and Obaid had been imprisoned in Helmand. My heart stopped for a second. I went with him to the compound to get more details. I told him that the drug dealers in Kandahar and Helmand are wild and that Idrees and Obaid should have never been sent there, because they were not from the area. His colleagues became emotional and upset. I became more suspicious. Their reaction told me something I didn’t want to hear. The world went dark. I imagined horrible things happening to my brother. Even a poet cannot describe the pain of a close one’s murder. His superior called my name and told me with regret that Idrees was killed.”

  Tahmina begins to whimper, covering her eyes with her glittery head scarf. Zaki turns his head toward her to soothe her, but he breaks down, too. He holds his head in his hands and sobs. Then he lifts up his head and continues to tell me the story, choked up.

  “I lost my color. I had no tears then. I was just angry. ‘Where is he?’ I demanded. The deputy said the bodies are coming about one PM and we can take Idrees when we’re ready to bury him. We didn’t have to wash the body because he was a martyr. Martyrs are clean from their sacrifice.

  “Then I called people, our neighbors here in Kabul, and my cousin in Kunduz. I told him to keep the news until I prepared the family. When I got home, the family wasn’t aware yet, but my sister Khadija, who was very close to him, was suspicious. This was the first time he had been gone for so long. Our youngest brother, Ansar, who’s in high school, figured it out after a neighbor began crying in front of him. We turned our guests away and I told the family that a distant uncle had died in Kunduz and we had to drive there for the funeral.”

  In Afghanistan, the closest people to the deceased, especially women, are protected from news of a death until the last possible minute, when the body is buried. Women are discouraged from attending burials, to protect them from the emotional pain. Afghans find it cruel when I tell them that in the United States a person dying of cancer is the first to know, then the closest family members. When an Afghan is diagnosed with cancer, the doctor does not immediately share it with the patient. Zaki’s effort to hide the death of Idrees was a desperate attempt to delay his family’s grief.

  “The family left,” he continues. “My parents were already there. I stayed behind to go on the plane with the body. The foreigners gave us a thousand dollars for the burial. I saw his body in a coffin for a minute. He had been in the morgue for five days. His scarf was over his face where they had hit him. His silver watch was still on. I finally believed he was dead.

  “When we arrived in Kunduz, at about six PM, my mother asked, ‘Where’s my son?’ She fell apart and insisted on seeing his body at the burial. There were too many men around for her to see. About five hundred people came to the funeral.”

  “How do you feel now?” I ask.

  “I’m angry at the NIU for sending him there and I want to do my own investigation into what happened. There are too many unanswered questions. I want to know if the government is protecting one of their own men for this, was it a small-time informant or someone higher up? Is the governor of Helmand a suspect and is he under investigation?”

  The Afghan counterterrorism directorate is also investigating the case, and an official there tells me that the trail of the criminals has gone cold. “They’re most likely in Quetta. We know Shah Wali’s there but we don’t know where exactly. He has a couple of wives and a house in Kabul, and we’re watching the house to arrest him if he returns. Until then, there’s nothing that can be done. The other side of the border belongs to the Taliban.”

  I leave Idrees’s home sad but inspired—the death of the two honorable agents will go unreported while news of drug dealers, corrupt officials, and the growing unrest in Afghanistan will make news headlines across the world. I wish I had known Idrees, had at least talked to him. After speaking to dozens of greedy, lying, self-serving drug smugglers and law enforcement agents, I find that Idrees’s commitment and belief in the law have given me faith in a system tainted with double agents, double crossings, and shifting loyalties. I hope his sacrifice will not be forgotten.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In Search of Darya

  The trip I have dreaded for six months is approaching. It’s time to find Darya. I have many thoughts of pulling out. Too many violent nightmares, too many risks involved. I have traveled to the north and the west without much fear, because I speak Farsi, the most common language in those regions. Now I am going to unknown territory, where Afghans who speak Pashto dominate. I know I have to go, to tell the full story of my country’s relationship with opium, and to try to find the shivering little girl who tugged on my coat and asked me to save her from being enslaved to a man thirty-four years older than she. Darya would be fourteen years old now. I wonder if her eyes still flash with anger the way they did two years ago. Is she still forgetting her slippers and walking barefoot in the sand? She must have reached puberty and become a stunning young woman. I have been thinking about her throughout my travels in Afghanistan. Her pleading eyes are a lasting image in my mind. All I know is that she lives in Helmand, the most dangerous province in the country.

  The capital of Helmand, Lashkargah, was called Little America when my family lived there in the 1970s. My father was an administrative manager of the fertilizer company and received a comfortable government salary. My mother says the four years we lived in Lashkargah were the best times of her life. I recall the dinner parties my family threw for their friends and neighbors: men and women gathered together playing music and eating kabobs and palau rice. My brother, Hadi, was a university student in Kabul, and when he visited on holidays, he displayed his m
usical talent playing the harmonium and singing while someone played the tabla. I would dance, twirling coquettishly around the living room while the guests clapped. On warmer days, we would take trips to the ancient castle of Qala-e-Bost on the Helmand River, the longest river in Afghanistan. We would fish, then barbecue in the verdant riverside. I have no memory of linguistic or ethnic rivalries. We socialized with everyone on the block—Pashtun, Tajik, Baloch—but I was a little girl who paid no attention to such divisions or to the darker history of Little America.

  After World War II, King Zahir had a surplus of cash and he wanted to use it to modernize Afghanistan. In the 1950s he hired the U.S. company Morrison Knudsen, the builder of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, to construct a modern city modeled on an American suburb. The project was part of a greater mission by the U.S. government to build capitalistic societies in developing countries and to discourage the spread of communism. The king’s foreign advisers chose Helmand because of its river. They gave parcels of land to nomadic Pashtuns to settle and begin farming. The Little America project included a hydroelectric dam and an extensive irrigation network, as well as suburban houses with tree-lined paved roads and green lawns without the usual walls that Afghans erected around their homes. American engineers and American-educated Afghans poured into Helmand to implement the project, but after the first test of the water and soil, they discovered that there was too much salt and that the ground had become waterlogged from the canals they’d built. The experts warned both governments that if they continued building canals and constructing the dam, the river could dry up. The warnings were ignored. It became more important to show short-term results than to consider long-term consequences—a repetitive folly of American policy in Afghanistan. The dam project was abandoned during the Communist takeover, and most of the engineers and technocrats fled the country, but the damage was already done. The soil was so eroded that orchards disappeared and the only harvest yield was from grains and poppy. Hence, American aid played a key role in Helmand’s transformation into the largest poppy producing province in Afghanistan.

  During the Soviet-Afghan war, Mullah Nasim, commander of the mujahideen in Helmand, issued decrees for farmers to cultivate poppy, and he brought in chemists to process the opium. The farmers stopped growing grains and obeyed Nasim, who taxed their harvest to fund his guerrilla war.

  After the Communists seized power, my family left Helmand for Kandahar.

  I first returned to Helmand six months after the Taliban’s fall, in the summer of 2002. I was with two other colleagues driving cross-country through the southern belt. We turned from the main highway on to a dirt road into desert, following the tire tracks toward Lashkargah. The tree-lined streets were gone, the roads had deteriorated to cracked gravel, and the Helmand River where I used to fish with my father was lifeless and shallow. The people all wore traditional Afghan garb, and we saw few women in public. The men smiled at us, but there was a look of distrust in their eyes. This was not the Helmand my family had left behind.

  Three years later, I am traveling to a much more hostile Helmand, where NIU agents Idrees and Obaid were shot dead on the side of a road. The Taliban are gaining ground against the British military. Helmand farmers have become experts at poppy farming, and drug lords often clash with one another and their government counterparts in competition for the best deals. The population of 1.5 million is dependent on profits from poppy cultivation to survive; they say they will stop farming if they have alternatives. But some of them are being forced into farming poppy by the Taliban, and alternative programs are being sabotaged by a lack of security. For decades Pakistan’s poorest province, Balochistan, bordering Helmand, has been a breeding ground for smuggling. The Balochis, like the Pashtuns, live on both sides of the border and feel marginalized and discriminated against by both the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments.

  I decide to wear a burqa and work undercover.

  Haji Sufi, Darya’s husband, is a poppy farmer in one of the districts here. He took his opium bride a year after I left her in Ghoryan begging to be freed of him.

  The last people to see Darya whom I know are the Afghan photographers I work with, Massoud and Farzana. They visited Ghoryan to take pictures of her. Darya and her mother, Basira, met them in Darya’s grandmother’s house. Darya and Basira wore black chadors for the photos and Darya “showed only her eyes and covered the rest of her body when she caught me taking photos of her,” Massoud says. “Both Darya and her mother wanted us to help them free her of the smuggler husband. They blamed the marriage on her father, who was no longer at home. I told them I would report it to the human rights commission in Herat. I did, and the commission did nothing about it.”

  Finding Darya will not be easy. I have no proper address and no invitation from her husband. As far as I know, he is a Taliban sympathizer who will not welcome me into his home. He may think of me as a loose foreign woman. Still, I was taught that, in Pashtun culture, even if the hosts do not like their guests, they will feed and house them. I am hoping that Haji Sufi’s sense of hospitality will be stronger than his anger toward me as a foreigner interested in the well-being of his second wife.

  All I have is the name of a district in the province where Haji Sufi has lived—an area where opium is sold openly and the Taliban and their sympathizers rule. Information coming into Kabul about the area suggests that foreigners are generally not welcome there and will likely be kidnapped or killed. I carry a photo of Haji Sufi that I took two years ago. I plan to show it while going door to door until I find Darya. I am betting on the popular notion that there are only two degrees of separation between Afghans, and most often we all know each other.

  Some months before, I visited Ghoryan during Eid-al-Fitr, the feast after Ramadan. The district was changing. The road from Herat city to Ghoryan was paved, and it took only an hour, instead of three, to reach the town center. More residents had access to power and water, and more schools had been built in the remote villages of the district.

  My former guide, Saber, came to the city and we rode to Ghoryan together, heading directly to his house, where we were welcomed with an elaborate lunch of meat and rice. I was a special guest—my six-week stay in their home a year before had solidified our bond. We had kept in touch in the months I had been away. Saber was working odd jobs, and he was eager for his wife, Tarana, to become pregnant. His sister Tina was still single and tending to their household meticulously. But the opium tragedy had infected his family, too, as one of his younger brothers had become addicted in the last year. Saber didn’t want to talk about his brother. “The whole district is still suffering,” he told me, “and when you came, the business was divided among a few drug lords. Now more and more people are getting involved and addicted as refugees keep returning from Iran.”

  After lunch, I insisted on seeing Darya. Saber gave me a mournful look.

  “She’s gone,” he said, pausing for my reaction. “He took her.”

  I felt a surge of panic. My hands became clammy and my throat knotted.

  “What about her sister Saboora?” I asked. “Did her drug dealer husband ever show up?”

  “No, he’s probably dead. She’s still with her mother.”

  “Let’s go see them.”

  The family now lived in the grandmother’s house. Basira came out in her colorful Eid clothes with her youngest daughter, Hana. She kissed my cheek and motioned me to climb a mud-brick-cobbled stairway to a small room. Saboora, who had been hostile every time I visited previously, was standing at the top of the stairway. But she was cordial this time, smiling as her mother led me to the guest room. The room was adorned with Eid sweets—dried fruit, nuts, cakes, and cookies—and fresh pots of green tea. The family seemed better off than when I last visited them, but then again, it was Eid, a holiday when Muslims push away their sadness, dress up, clean their homes, and find their festive mood.

  I asked Basira about Darya.

  “She finally went with him three mo
nths ago,” she said. “Her father came back and convinced her to go. We all went to Helmand for her wedding. It was a simple event—no music, no festivity. She was not allowed to wear makeup. No one danced. It was just a bunch of women, and we were fed a meal and told to go home.

  “She still had not had her period yet,” Basira added. “She had to go. She had no choice. But she insisted that her brother Aman stay with her, because she didn’t want to be alone.” Aman was ten. I shuddered to think of what was being done to a handsome boy like him. Afghan commanders are infamous for fighting over young boys they want to rape and keep as prizes.

  “Aman is so young. Now he has my son and daughter,” Basira says, referring to Haji Sufi, “and I haven’t seen either for months. Can you go find them and tell him to send my son back?” she pleaded with me like a beggar.

  I promised her I would visit Haji Sufi and relay her message.

  Basira thinks I’m doing her a favor, but she doesn’t realize that, in some ways, finding Darya is my salvation—one that is perhaps as illusory as my nostalgia for the homeland of my childhood—but the trail has grown colder as the months have gone by.

  On the night before my trip to the south, I sleep three hours. In those hours, I dream of walking on a river, floating on top of the waves. All around me is green grass, and the air is clean. Then, suddenly, I start to sink, unable to swim, gasping for air. I jolt awake to the phone ringing; it is my driver, Jawid, saying he is waiting outside to drive me to the bus depot. It is four thirty AM and the sun has not come out yet. There is no going back now.

  The public bus headed to Kandahar leaves from the crowded bus station in Kabul. The sun is coming up and I am already feeling the oncoming heat as I board the bus. Kandahar is the safest route to Helmand by road and a city in which I spent a year of my childhood during the war. Kandahar is the base of the Karzai clan and the birthplace of the Taliban movement. It’s also one of Afghanistan’s ancient and strategic cities, where empires have risen and fallen. Like Herat and Kabul, Kandahar is located in a province with the same name. The United States and NATO have set up a base at the city’s airport. It borders Pakistan’s Quetta province, where the Taliban, al Qaeda, and major drug smugglers have safe haven. Kandahar is a trade route in the region. The province used to produce dried fruit, grains, cotton, silk, and wool, but after the Soviet invasion farmers turned to poppy, and so did the traders. Some of the major Afghan drug kingpins hail from Kandahar.