Opium Nation Page 8

  The happiness that Afghans inside the country radiate is contagious, and despite my reservations about the new government and foreign involvement, I begin to believe that Afghanistan may come out of its decades-long coma. If educated Afghans return and partake in rebuilding Afghanistan, then a chance for security and a stable government exists. Perhaps a firm leader with will and vision can revive the country.

  “Mr. Nawa, where should I drop you off?” the driver asks. “You’re welcome to come to our house.”

  “We’re going to my wife’s cousin’s house,” my father replies. “His name is Sayed Sattar Agha.” On my trip to Herat in 2000, I formed a bond with my step-grandmother Bibi Assia and Uncle Ahmed’s family. For that week at Uncle Ahmed’s house with his two wives, five daughters, son, and my grandma, we disobeyed the Taliban and played cards and music, shopped, and visited shrines. My cousins watched me stand on the roof of my childhood home and cry. But on this trip, Bibi Assia is on holiday in Iran, and my mother has suggested that we stay with her first cousin Sattar Agha, so that I have a chance to get to know my other relatives in Herat.

  “He has seven daughters,” my father explains to the driver. “I’m not sure what their address is, except that he lives in an orchard home.”

  “There’s no need for the address,” the driver says. “He’s famous in Herat for having seven daughters and no sons. He lives in the best part of Herat, near downtown. I’ll take you to his doorstep.”

  Once we arrive at Sattar Agha’s house unannounced, his wife, Aunt Masooda, and four of the daughters welcome us with hot thermoses of tea and plates of pistachios, walnuts, and raisins. The other three daughters live in Germany and Russia with their families. The daughters in Herat inspire me. Shahira, a doctor, and Rabia, a teacher, are married. Shahira, hardworking and shy, is the mother of two children, and Rabia, boisterous and an excellent cook, has a daughter. Sattar Agha’s youngest daughters still live with their parents; Neela is an art student at Herat University, and Bita is a sophomore in high school. Under the Taliban, the older girls became housewives and the younger ones studied secretly with private home tutors. Now they are all back to working and learning.

  Sattar Agha, an administrator at Herat’s police headquarters, and his daughters sit quietly while Aunt Masooda, a petite, soft-spoken homemaker, asks about our journey.

  “How was the ride from Iran? Not too bothersome, I hope. We hope you will enjoy your stay here enough to move back.”

  “Maybe I will,” my dad replies. “America is a nice place but it will never be my home.”

  That evening, Sattar Agha takes my father’s hand and leads him to their home’s greenhouse, a horticulturalist’s fantasy, with a cornucopia of blooming plants and flowers. A wicker table and chairs furnish the space. A water pipe and ornate tea cups are placed in the center of the table. Sattar Agha’s daughters must prepare fresh tea, but male cousins serve the tea to Sattar’s friends, who gather every evening. The men play cards and some smoke cigarettes as they engage in conversation. My dad will enjoy himself here, I think.

  After a day of rest with my father and Sattar Agha’s family, I make arrangements to travel to Kabul by plane. I’m in a hurry to leave again, this time to cover the Loya Jirga, or grand assembly, an indigenous form of representation in which influential figures from communities, usually men, gather to make important decisions. My father stays behind, eager to rediscover his city. “Go where you need to. I’m going to be fine here with Sattar Agha as my guide. We’re going to have a good time.”

  The post-Taliban changes and gleeful mood of the country are more prevalent in the capital. Women are everywhere in public: shopping, laughing, eating. The deep bass of the drumbeat in Afghan folk music rings in the shops and restaurants. The child beggars who squatted and held their grimy hands out with frowns during the time of the Taliban now chase each other on the street and smile at passersby. They hold out their hands to their new clients, the thousands of foreigners entering the city with bleeding hearts and full pockets.

  Inside the Loya Jirga tent set up on the grounds of Polytechnic University, fifteen hundred delegates from the thirty-two provinces—including women, tribal elders, teachers, and, to the dismay of many Afghans, the former mujahideen—gather to choose a transitional president. It feels like a big village party, with delegates sitting on the carpeted floor around pots of tea, perspiring in the ninety-five-degree heat. But the political backroom dealings and old ethnic rivalries linger. The men who helped the United States oust the Taliban—Abdul Rashid Dostum, Karim Khalili, Ismail Khan, and Mohammed Fahim, the man who replaced Massoud as the Jamiat leader—cause controversy inside the tent. Now that their enemy, the Taliban, have been purged, they are no longer united. Human Rights Watch, the New York–based group, accuses them of using coercion and bribery to influence the elections. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Afghanistan, backs up the allegations. “Voting for the Loya Jirga has been plagued by violence and vote-buying. There were attempts at manipulation, violence, unfortunately. Money was used, threats were used,” he tells ABC News.

  The members of the grand assembly I interview favor the former king Zahir, now eighty-eight years old, or a member of his family.

  “Things weren’t perfect, but we had peace when King Zahir was in power. If he’s too old, I will vote for someone in his family to run Afghanistan,” one of the delegates tells me anonymously, echoing the sentiment of dozens of others unaffiliated with militia or political groups. But assembly organizers tell me the former mujahideen threaten to attack the capital if the king is elected. They say the United States is opposed to reinstating Zahir. When Zahir addresses the assembly, the electricity powered by a giant generator suddenly shuts off. It’s unclear if this is merely a coincidence—power failures are common in Afghanistan—or deliberate.

  The former king’s chances of reinstatement as a leader die completely when Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy in Afghanistan, holds a press conference to announce the king’s disinterest in becoming the country’s leader. “The former king is not a candidate for a position in the Transitional Authority. . . . He endorses the candidacy of Chairman Karzai.” Khalilzad, an Afghan native who is an American neoconservative, exercises more power than Karzai in Afghanistan. The U.S. government believes Zahir is too old and too soft for the new Afghanistan.

  Karzai is predictably reappointed because the delegates do not have other viable options besides the former mujahideen. After Karzai’s victory, two of the Loya Jirga delegates, Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi, write an editorial for the New York Times: “While the Bonn agreement and the rules of the Loya Jirga entitled us to choose the next government freely, we delegates were denied anything more than a symbolic role in the selection process. A small group of Northern Alliance chieftains led by the Panjshiris decided everything behind closed doors and then dispatched Mr. Karzai to give us the bad news.”

  Khalilzad’s direct involvement in shoving the king and other monarchists out of the Loya Jirga delegitimizes the democratic process and taints it with American meddling. Even if the king or one of his family members were selected as the Afghan leader, the same problems Afghanistan faces today might have occurred, because the institutions and infrastructure of democracy are absent. However, the choice should have been given to the Afghan delegates, to prove that the assembly elections were free from external influence. In order to succeed, a nascent democracy must be a native-supported process.

  Three thousand women gather in a girls’ secondary school in the dusty district of Ghoryan, in Herat province. Districts in Afghanistan are akin to counties in the United States. Scattered villages across the desert make up a district, and each district has a governor and a town center.

  Today’s gathering is in a large tent, with a stage for the speakers and performers. No chairs are brought in for the audience; there’s just the ground to stand on. The stage is cluttered with vases of fake flowers, miniature paintings of women, and wrapped gifts. There isn’t e
nough room for everyone, and many people stand outside the tent, anxious for the program to begin. It is perhaps a hundred degrees with the July sun shining on the women’s black chadors. The large crowd leaves little room for movement. The open air should provide plenty of room to breathe, but the intensity of the event—such a large gathering of women in a school after they’ve been banned from education for the last six years—makes the space claustrophobic. The assembly is in honor of Afghanistan’s Mother’s Day, which is normally celebrated in June.

  My friends Angeles Espinosa, Spain’s renowned newspaper correspondent, and Heike Schütz, a fearless German photographer, have accompanied me to Ghoryan because they heard that a women’s movement is in motion here. I’ve read that many Afghan women are active in politics and pushing for independent candidates to join Afghanistan’s first election process toward democracy. Ghoryan is also Mr. Jawan’s home district and the route he used to smuggle opium to Iran.

  I expect to hear speeches about the resilience of mothers, their patience and kindness, the same talks I heard as a child in celebration of Mother’s Day in Herat. One of the organizers, a teacher, welcomes the audience and introduces the first speaker, the district governor, Jalil Nikyar. A mustachioed bureaucrat with graying hair and a polyester suit steps up to the microphone. “Our community has suffered greatly from this evil drug. We need to fight against the enemies who have polluted Ghoryan. A place known for producing scholars and doctors is now the center for smugglers, drug addicts, and thieves. You have a responsibility as mothers to advise your sons and husbands to stop using opium and seek work. We have lost too many sons, too many of our men to this trade, and now you women are left to bear the scars,” he says. “Once drugs enter your house, you can no longer control it. You lose your pride and your dignity.”

  I’m dumbfounded by the speech. Why is he talking about drugs at a Mother’s Day event?

  Two girls step onstage, one dressed in boy’s clothes, and they perform a skit. It is like an assembly at my California high school, where students performed skits to encourage sobriety. In Ghoryan, the girl plays the role of a mother, and the boy is her son, who has become an opium addict. The mother begs her son to stop smoking opium.

  I can hear women in the audience crying quietly. I know that Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world’s illegal opium supply; I know that opium becomes heroin and is distributed on the streets of London and New York; I know that agriculture in Afghanistan has evolved into poppy farming. But I had little idea of the impact this illicit business was having on communities in Afghanistan.

  At one point I find myself onstage with Angeles and Heike, in front of the three thousand women. They want their foreign guests to speak. I am not sure what to say.

  Angeles speaks first, and I translate. “We would like to thank you for having us here,” she says, her tone friendly and soothing. “We’re very happy to see you and we want to hear your stories so that the rest of the world can understand your pain.”

  The women in the audience push closer to the stage. The lack of room makes me nervous. The women in the back are stepping on one another to get a closer look at us. They are so curious. They stare at us without discretion.

  “What else? Is that all you have to tell us?” one older woman shouts, her chador covering her mouth.

  They want us to say we can change their lives, that the new government and the fall of the Taliban will mean the end of the drug trade and better economic opportunities. But we cannot. The answer is in them, these women who are ready to fight back and recapture their district from the drug lords. The strength of Ghoryan is in the women’s willingness to resist a much more insidious aggressor than the Soviets or the Taliban.

  We are presented with gifts, beautiful shawls, and we step off the stage and are led to a classroom. The headmistress brings us chairs and soft drinks. The mothers and their daughters who attend the school hover around us, all wanting to tell their stories at the same time.

  “We have nothing to live on, no money, no food—we need help,” one woman laments.

  “I prefer to put on the chador and beg on the street before allowing my children to enter into the [drug] business,” says another. Her name, I learn, is Fatema Alizai. Her husband, a drug dealer, was shot by the Iranian border police twelve years ago.

  “We have to stop the drugs from coming here because it’s destroying our families,” another woman interjects. These women do not have the self-discipline to give each other a chance to speak, but they all seem to be relaying the same message: help us.

  Nikyar, the district governor, tells us that this district of fifty-four thousand people includes dozens of villages sprawled across the desert. Men, women, and children survive by working in the opium industry as couriers, dealers, pushers, smugglers, or drug lords. The drug’s cultivation and sale have been outlawed in the country, but Ghoryan became hooked long before Karzai took power. Addicts, who include women, hide in their homes. When they do come outside, they sit on the streets and beg. Some women become prostitutes to feed their habit. No red light districts exist in Ghoryan; men know which houses to go to for sex.

  “In our community they circulate heroin, cocaine, hashish, and other colorful substances that I don’t even know the names of,” Nikyar admits. “Of the thirty-seven hundred addicts we’ve identified, between a thousand and fifteen hundred are women.”

  We are all sweating from the heat, and Angeles and Heike are getting restless. The three of us head back toward the city of Herat in a beaten-up taxi. On the unpaved road exiting Ghoryan, we see a woman who allows only one eye to show through her chador. She tries to stop our taxi, stretching a hand into the open window. Before we can give her anything, the driver speeds away. Her hand falls out of the window forcefully. She looks me straight in the eye, as if I have betrayed her. She looks like a monster, with one eye bulging out of blackness.

  “She’s an addict. She doesn’t deserve any handouts,” the driver says. I don’t know how he knows this, but I take his word for it. I am shaken up. A U.S. dollar might have fed her for a week.

  Nikyar pointed out in his speech that Ghoryan was once more than just a port for narcotics. It was a landmark district, one that produced scholars. The district is known for its eight-hundred-year-old fort, located at the end of the main road, in the Ghoryan town center. The citadel, with its several towers, crumbling thirteen-meter-thick walls, and steel gate, is now home to the Ghoryan police station and prison. The native authorities proudly refer to this military maze as a reminder of a glorious era, from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century, when Ghoryan was a strategic base for the Persian Ghurid dynasty, which stretched from Iran to India. The Ghurids’ rich culture focused on the arts, languages, and literature. But Ghoryan was also a place of constant warfare. Local tribes wanting to keep their independence fought against the various empires that wanted to rule them. It was a polarized society, with a tiny educated community facing off against conservative tribes. Ghoryan’s contemporary history boasts some highly accomplished individuals who studied in the United States and have written books on physics and Islamic scholarship and served as sterling examples in government posts in Afghanistan. But that history and those individuals are forgotten in the wake of what Ghoryan has come to represent: poverty and smuggling.

  Three decades ago, before the Communists seized control of the country, Ghoryan smugglers trafficked tea and fabrics, but only small amounts of opium. Opium was illegal in Afghanistan and Iran, but the other commodities were smuggled to evade tariffs. Villagers would fill some tin cans with green tea, others with opium, then load the cans in cloth bags onto their donkeys and ride across the border. If they got caught, they paid a small bribe to authorities on both sides of the border. The tribes who smuggled passed on the job to the next generation, making it a family tradition, like farming.

  Most Tajik villagers depended on agriculture and sheepherding to survive. Pashtun tribes, such as the Soltanzi, the Nurzai, and t
he Achakzai, became the patron smugglers in Ghoryan. These were the tribes that Abdur Rahman Khan forcibly relocated to the area in the late 1800s, ordering them to fight back if Iran attacked the border. The king did not want Iran to claim Herat, which was predominantly inhabited by Tajiks with roots in Iran. He gave the tribes land but few economic opportunities. They farmed and grazed animals but made their money chiefly through smuggling. Herat province is now home to people of multiple ethnicities.

  For Angeles and Heike, Ghoryan is just another story, while I cannot stop thinking about the desperate pleas of the women gathered at the school and the one-eyed woman beggar whom the taxi driver dismissed as an addict.

  In Herat city, my father has lost weight and gotten a deep tan from sitting on the orchard lawn drinking tea and watching Sattar Agha water his rosebushes. Today I walk in the house with Angeles and Heike to see my father sitting uncomfortably on a red toshak (mat) in the living room, his eyes fixated on the tea leaves in his cup. He wears a white pirahan tomban, an outfit he would have worn with disdain during my childhood because he thought Western clothes were more dignified. When he hears my footsteps, he looks up, frowning. “I want to go back,” he says, his voice rising. “I have nothing to do here.”

  We had planned to stay for the entire summer, but he tells me he has had enough of the new Herat. “This place and its people are not what I left behind. There’s nothing for me here. No one. Where are the intellectuals, the people who can change this place? People have become greedy and selfish. Sattar Agha’s family has been very good to me, but the rest of the city is full of potato vendors and taxi drivers with narrow-minded mentalities.”