Opium Nation Read online

  Because of its location on the border, Herat province is the Taliban’s most lucrative area. The Afghan government benefits from customs fees charged for goods entering the country from Iran. The province is home to hundreds of wealthy merchants who profit from importing goods such as clothes and cars. But being rich in Afghanistan means merely that families have enough to eat.

  This prosperity, compared with the rest of the country, gives Herat’s residents more leeway to break the law. For example, though women are officially banned from leaving their homes without a mahram, I see dozens of them walking the streets without men. The Taliban soldiers leave them unharmed. (In Kabul, the ragtag moral police beat women caught in public without a man.) The Taliban’s strict rules are constraining for my uncle’s family, and for many others in urban Herat, but a quiet rebellion is unleashed inside homes in response to the laws that limit education and mobility. Uncle Ahmed’s family disobeys the Taliban every day. My cousins scoff at the ban on music and television, and the girls show me their satellite dish propped up on their porch, the family’s television, and the musical instruments in the basement.

  Despite the disobedience, the Taliban have instilled fear in Herat’s women and young men. True, Heratis take advantage of their more permissive situation, but they go about it in a schizophrenic manner. My first night at Uncle Ahmed’s, my cousins drum on their tambourines at midnight, cursing the Taliban as they play. All five girls raise their voices in chorus to sing a famous folk song, “Sabza”:

  The tan-skinned beloved is coming coquettishly.

  The holder of secrets is coming.

  Listen to my heart full of pain

  Love burns my heart.

  Habiba, ten years old and the youngest girl, with a plump round face and a thick mane of hair, sings louder than the others, and Nazaneen, fair skinned and stout, who is five years older than Habiba, admonishes her.

  “Shameless! Lower your voice! Do you want the Taliban to come to our door?”

  “Allow me to shit on the beard of the Taliban’s father,” Habiba shoots back, invoking a common Herati expletive.

  The next day, the girls speak in hushed voices, afraid the Taliban are coming to punish them. They have heard too many stories of the moral police raiding homes, even those of their neighbors, to remove musical instruments, satellite dishes, and television sets. One way of appeasing certain high-ranking members of the local Taliban is to invite them to parties, where they join in on the festivities. Uncle Ahmed sees that his daughters are afraid now and thinks of sending out an invitation.

  “I can invite over the chief of our police district tonight if you girls cook him a big dinner,” he says. “He likes to watch the Hindi film songs.”

  “They don’t deserve to eat, Haji Agha,” the outspoken Habiba responds.

  On the second day of my visit, I stroll through the streets for the first time with my cousins. I walk more slowly than the girls, embarrassed that I might trip on the flowing fabric of my burqa. There is power in being invisible. Men on the street notice my ankles and hands but do not look at my face, do not see my eyes watching them. I stare at their expressions, reading them without the interruption of their gaze. I see in their eyes a devilish curiosity about the opposite sex.

  The main streets have been paved since my childhood. There is a new market for computers and software, and a sparkly building has replaced the cinema where my parents used to watch Hindi movies. The biggest difference is the rise in the number of beggars. Maimed children, women in torn, dirt-covered burqas, and old men with white beards lower their heads and hold out their hands as my cousins and I walk past them. I recall beggars from when I was young, but they dotted the streets then; they didn’t line them.

  “Let’s go back home,” I tell the girls after an hour. I need to digest the changes I’ve seen.

  After lunch, my cousin Bahram escorts me to my family home in downtown Herat. It’s two miles from my uncle’s house, and we take a taxi—a Toyota Corolla with red-velvet-covered seats, an ornament with “Allah” inscribed inside dangling from the rearview mirror, and spotless windows. Halfway through the ride, I see a horse wagon and become nostalgic. Bahram and I step out of the taxi and board the wooden wagon. The driver, an old man with a turban, holds a whip. He slaps the horse once with it, and I protest. “It’s okay if the horse goes slow. Please don’t hit him.”

  “Okay, sister,” he replies, and the horse trots behind the rickshaws, taxis, and buses. A few minutes later we reach Baba Monshi’s property. Behzad Road is wider, with a new market of small variety shops, but the same dusty pine trees I tried to climb as an eight-year-old. I knock at the home’s old brass gate. A child opens the door and leads me to my ailing grandmother, who is praying. I lift the front of my burqa as she turns her head. Bibi Assia screams in disbelief, as if I am a ghost. She seems to pass out for a few seconds, before hugging me and sobbing on my shoulder. She still feels like a cushion when I hug her. Her hair is completely gray now, but her eyes are still a warm blue. She gives me a tour of the old property, most of which has been sold off by my family. The new owners built several smaller houses and walls, which divide the land. The only part of the property that remains the same is the saracha, the guesthouse, where Bibi Assia lives. Baba Monshi died in 1984, and all my aunts and uncles moved to Europe and the United States. The saracha is nearly in shambles—the bathroom roof has collapsed, the paint is chipping off the walls, and the doors are rotting. My paternal family also owns farmland in the village of Abdi, in Herat province, and Bibi Assia receives her share of profits from the harvest, plus portions of rice and flour that come from our land. She has enough to survive, but I never expected to find her living in these squalid conditions. She sees the concern on my face and says she plans to move.

  “I’m going to sell this place and use the money to buy a quieter house in the city,” she says reassuringly. “Businesses want this property so they can add to the row of shops being built on the block. It’s time for me to shut the doors here. Then you can come and stay with me in the new house.”

  My memories of this place are riddled with the violence of the Soviet war, the stray bullets, the school bombing, and the blood—painful reminders of a past I wish I could forget. But I cannot, and it’s these same memories that have brought me here. Two decades later, with Bibi Assia next to me, I now stand on the ground where I once played hopscotch. I scatter some dirt with my shoe and a knot ties itself in my throat. I want to leave. I take Bibi Assia to Uncle Ahmed’s house to spend the next few days with me.

  When we get there, Aunt Zulaikha greets us with a long face. When I ask her why she looks upset, she says she’s just found out that her brother has been imprisoned in Iran for smuggling opium from Herat. She isn’t sure he’ll make it out alive. “He searched for legitimate work, but narcotics trafficking was the only option he found. I hope they don’t hang him.” I haven’t seen her brother, and it’s the first time I’ve heard about the dire consequences of opium smuggling for Afghans.

  “Hanging? That’s terrible, Khala Jan,” I say. “The only stories about opium I know are the ones that our neighbor Mr. Jawan told us as kids. The worst punishment back in those days was a few nights in jail.”

  “Fariba Jan, there’s a lot more opium and a lot more misery now,” she says, smiling at my naïveté.

  I want to know more about the drug trade and how Aunt Zulaikha’s brother was arrested, but asking questions will only endanger Uncle Ahmed’s family.

  The next five days pass quickly. The few times I go out with my female cousins, I shop at the dozens of jewelry shops with gaudy gold earrings and necklaces displayed in the windows. The Taliban do not allow women to enter the shops; all transactions have to be made outside the store. We visit the crowded mausoleum of Sufi poets Ansari and Jami. Frequenting shrines seems to be the only outing for families besides shopping. One day I walk down the street of my old school, Lycée Mehri. The main door appears locked, which I expected, since it
was an all-girls school and girls are now banned from education. I do not cross the street to get a closer look. The memories of the attack are still vivid.

  On the sixth day of my visit to Herat, I return to my maternal grandfather’s orchard home for the first time in eighteen years. I could have visited the orchard on my first day, because Uncle Ahmed has the key and lives only a few houses away, but I wanted to save the best for last. The property is empty because my grandparents and ten aunts and uncles now live abroad. This is the place I have been longing to see all these years.

  I throw my burqa on the ground as soon as the rusted red gate closes and I sprint toward the living quarters, imagining my family’s laughter ringing inside the hallways. But there is no one there; the place is silent. The doors of each of the eight rooms are locked shut; some of the windows are broken. I run out to the field, looking for the mulberry and pomegranate trees under which we used to have picnics. I find the trees—but no fruit, due to the drought. The small creek is parched. The house, the barn, and the land seem much smaller. Then I recall that my uncles sold an acre of the land a few years ago. Both my paternal and maternal family properties have undergone the same transformation. I had no expectations with regard to the Behzad Road property, where Bibi Assia lives. But here, in my refuge, I envisioned ripe, colorful fruits, verdant fields, and water flowing through the creek.

  I climb the roof overlooking Herat and find even more changes caused by the war. A dust bowl covers the once-green stadium nearby. During my childhood, festivals were held there. Now the stadium has become the Taliban’s execution site. I bury my face in my hands and cry. The tears are cathartic.

  My distance from Herat for these nearly two decades left a void in me. Now, ten thousand miles away from my parents and family in California, I feel comforted; I’ve been indulging the past, but now that I have returned I’m able to look ahead to Afghanistan’s future—a future I hope to witness close up.

  On the seventh day, when I am due to leave, Mobin picks me up from Uncle Ahmed’s home. My uncle, aunts, cousins, and I hold and kiss one another; we promise to keep in contact. I’m returning to Pakistan, but I’m not going back to Iran. Mobin and I fly to Kabul on Ariana Afghan Airlines. In Kabul, we take a taxi to the border of Pakistan. For thirteen hours I sit huddled next to Mobin and two other men in the taxi’s backseat while, up front, two men share the passenger seat. The driver is the only one sitting comfortably as the taxi dodges boulders and potholes on the treacherous road. The only sound is the Hindi music, all but drowned out by the crackle of gravel underneath the tires. No one speaks, other than to ask what time we’re arriving. The driver turns off the music at checkpoints.

  Mobin and I spend the night in a seedy hotel in Jalalabad city, and the next day we take another taxi, this time to Torkham, the town where we will cross the border into Pakistan.

  At five am, we come upon a sea of women in blue burqas and men with long beards in pirahan tomban (a long tunic with loose pants) squatting on the ground near the border gates. I count more than five hundred people. From a restaurant loudspeaker, a man sings religious hymns set to no music. The restaurant is divided by a wide curtain to separate the men from the women. Most of the customers just drink tea. Mobin says that crossing will be difficult if he stays with me. “You can cross easier as a lone woman, because the Pakistanis allow women to enter without too much trouble.” I agree.

  He hires an emaciated man with a wagon to carry my bags across. He gives the man forty thousand Afghanis, the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. When the gates open, the mob lurches forward, pushing to cross the border. I have never seen such chaos—the Pakistani or tribal border police lash at the men with steel-tipped whips to keep them from moving forward. The women push, pull, kick, and yell to reach Pakistan. No one checks passports. A Pakistani policeman hits my porter with his whip.

  “Paisa, paisa [money]!” the porter yells at me.

  I hand him some small Afghan notes. He hands them to the police. Then comes another lash, and then another, until the porter is bleeding near his right eye. All the while the mob is pushing us forward. I feel paralyzed but continue to push as well. “Why is he hitting you?” I ask in Farsi. The porter speaks only Pashto, which I do not. He repeats the one word we both understand: money. I let loose some more notes. The porter grabs them and throws them at the policeman.

  “Stop hitting him, you motherfucker. Beat me!” I shout at the top of my lungs in broken Urdu, Pakistan’s official language. Finally, in what seems like hours but is closer to a few minutes, we reach the other side of the border. The religious hymns on the Afghan side are tuned out by loud Hindi Bollywood songs. Shops display AK-47s and advertise hashish for sale.

  A few steps farther on, I see Mobin hailing a taxi to take me to Peshawar.

  “How could you leave me alone in that environment?” I say. “I had no idea what to expect. The porter was bleeding, and it was a mob. How did you get here faster than me?”

  “I also pushed my way through,” he said. “It’s always like this, every morning.”

  “I want to make sure the porter’s okay.”

  “He’ll be fine. I see he’s gotten you all worked up. That’s what they hope to do, so they can take your money. After the border closes, they split the money the police get from you. It’s all a show. The police beat them to make you feel sorry for them and pay up. Then they divide up the profits.”

  “That’s how desperate people are—to allow themselves to be beaten for a few bucks? I probably gave just a dollar in that exchange. How awful.”

  “Fariba Jan, you remember the beginning of war in Afghanistan. What do you think happened all these years you’ve been gone? Life became bloodier and more miserable. I guess you won’t be coming back to Afghanistan again.”

  He was wrong. Although I’d lived a peaceful life in exile, I not only endured emptiness, but also carried the guilt that comes with survival. The only way I could absolve myself of that guilt, redeem myself, was to return and document the stories of those who were left behind, to make sure their experience of war would not be erased or forgotten.

  Chapter Two

  Four Decades of Unrest

  In Fremont, California, where we have made our new home, my family gathers around the television to watch the rebels entering Kabul. A convoy of hardened fighters in beards and turbans wave their arms at the crowd of proud Afghans, who welcome them with shouts of “God is great!” The uniformed, clean-shaven Soviets left in 1989, and in the spring of 1992, Najibullah, the last ruler of the Communist regime, surrendered to the mujahideen. It’s a moment we, the exiled diaspora, have been anticipating for a decade. We feel victorious, avenged. I’m a teenager boiling over with political fervor, anxious to travel back to Afghanistan to see what I left behind. Some of our family friends plan their repatriation; celebratory parties are held.

  My father knows better. “What are these mujahids capable of doing when they can’t even get along with each other?” he says. “It’s no time to go back.” He’s cynical and believes that inevitably the underreported ethnic, linguistic, and religious disagreements among the seven main factions of the mujahideen will surface.

  My mother doesn’t argue, even though she misses home. “Too much has been destroyed for us to return,” she says, her eyes fixed on the television. “Maybe someday, but not now.”

  Disappointed, I leave the living room and take refuge in my room. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking of how I could return on my own without my parents. But I’m too young, only nineteen, and too broke.

  Afghanistan was the last proxy conflict in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The country does not fit into any regional categories—it’s not South Asia, Central Asia, or the Middle East. The British carved out present-day Afghanistan in the nineteenth century as a buffer zone between British-controlled India and czarist Russia, and to keep its neighboring empires from attacking each other. The most contentious segment of
the current border is the Durand Line, the 1,610 miles between Pakistan and Afghanistan that divides the Pashtun tribes who live in both countries. The Durand Line was drawn in 1893 under an agreement between Afghan and British leaders, but contemporary Afghan leaders refuse to recognize that agreement, claiming the tribal territories of Pakistan as the property of Afghanistan. Many of the Pashtuns in Pakistan have separatist sentiments, wishing to reunite with Afghanistan, which gives Pakistan reason to want to control Afghanistan’s affairs. Some political analysts say that buffer zones fail as states and that Afghanistan is destined to fall apart because of its geography. Since Afghanistan’s inception as an empire in 1747, the area has been plagued by battles and wars, the latest of which is that between the United States/U.S. allies and the Taliban/al Qaeda.

  That armed conflict is supported by another war: the opium trade. The Taliban and al Qaeda are funding their war with arguably half a million dollars annually from Afghanistan’s illicit narcotics operation. In the 1980s the United States spent more than $3 billion funding the mujahideen’s overthrow of the Soviet-backed Communist regime. Ronald Reagan’s government disregarded—some historians say actually encouraged—the guerrillas to collect the benefits of the heroin trade to bankroll the larger cause of defeating the Soviets. Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and a sharp critic of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, wrote, “The United States was not waging a war on drugs, in short, but a war helped by drugs.”