Opium Nation Read online

  I sit down next to him, forgetting to remove my sweat-soaked coat and head scarf. Angeles and Heike leave the room, to give us some privacy.

  “Agha, it’s going to take time to change things,” I tell him. “What about our land? Do you want to sell it?” We have seven acres of agricultural land in Abdi, a village an hour away. “If you want to sell it, you’ll have to stay longer.”

  “I visited Abdi and I was happy to see barley and wheat and fields of green,” my father says. “The farmer who has manned that land for the last thirty years is dying and his family needs the harvest from that land. No, I don’t want to sell it.”

  “Can’t you stay another month and we’ll leave together?” I beg.

  “No, get me out of here. I don’t want to come back here. Don’t even bury me here!” he orders.

  That night, after dinner, when my father is asleep, I ask Sattar Agha if something happened while I was in Kabul for a month.

  “He feels like he doesn’t fit in here anymore,” Sattar Agha explains. “He listens and doesn’t talk much with my friends. The type of people he wants to be around—the older thinkers and writers—are either dead or living elsewhere.”

  I arrange for one of Sattar Agha’s sons-in-law to take my father to Iran; from there he’ll fly back to California.

  My father’s reaction disappoints me. I hoped the trip would bring him out of his twenty-year depression. He returned with the expectation that he could regain what he’d lost, that sense of home and belonging, but he leaves feeling more alone. Perhaps he did not feel welcomed by the Afghans he met. Afghans who did not leave the country are angry, envious of the exiles repatriating. “You left us behind, experienced the good life in the West, and now you’re here to make money by working with foreign companies,” I overhear a man tell a friend who has also returned to Kabul from California. “Don’t come back.”

  Perhaps it would’ve been better if I had never encouraged my father to come with me. I’ve taken away the majestic dream of the Herat he remembered. I worry that his depression might deepen now.

  My reaction toward the new Herat has been more positive, perhaps because I have fewer good memories of the past. I compare what I see now to the Herat under the Taliban two years ago. I can hear the hope in the voices of people in my hometown. Once-forbidden sounds echo throughout the city. In the bazaar, women’s high-heeled shoes clip rhythmically on the pavement, and songs from Bollywood films resound from the ice-cream shops.

  I write about the transformation, but sending the stories to English-language news outlets is problematic; reliable phone and Internet service is rare. Only international organizations such as UN offices, with their large satellite dishes, can support telecommunications. The office closest to Sattar Agha’s is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. I slip on my red Payless sandals and head there with my laptop bag slung over my shoulders.

  The summer air is hot and grimy, with the Herat dust covering my clammy palms. My head scarf and long black coat cling to my damp clothes. The UN office will also have air-conditioning; it’s a bubble of modernity I can’t wait to enter. At UNHCR, I find the director and offer to edit reports in exchange for daily access to Internet service. She says there’s no need for my editing but I can spend twenty minutes a day on the guest computer.

  She introduces me to an IT technician, Naeem. He has bronze skin and a deer’s brown eyes; his brow furrows in a frown. He wears jeans, a striped t-shirt. “You can ask me for any help you need with the computer,” he says. He speaks to me in flawless English, mistaking me for a foreigner. I compliment him on his English.

  “Why wouldn’t I? Why is it that people who come from abroad think we can’t be smart like them?” he replies.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I just haven’t heard Afghans here speak with such a clear accent before,” I say. “Biazoo tarji midaham ka Farsi gap zanim. [Anyway, I prefer we speak in Farsi.]”

  Naeem doesn’t smile much; he is a brooding, serious twenty-four-year-old troubled by Afghanistan’s tragic fate. His office is in the basement of the building. Instead of my allotted twenty minutes, I spend hours hidden away there writing my stories and chatting with Naeem and his officemate, Hamid, who is nineteen and enthused to have a female guest open to conversation. Afghan men and women are normally too afraid to talk to one another. Ismail Khan discourages contact between people of the opposite sex who are not related or married. Under the Taliban, women were banned from working in offices. And even now, under the mujahideen, men and women cannot speak freely to each other. Ismail Khan believes the only acceptable professions for women are teaching and child care. Women who work with foreign organizations are considered improper.

  “We heard that if [Ismail Khan’s] soldiers see a man and woman sitting too close and talking and they know they are not related, they take the woman to the hospital and check her virginity,” Naeem tells me with disgust. “He’s doing what the mullahs in Iran do, and it’s making him unpopular with the youth here.”

  “What do you guys want it to be like here?” I ask. “What kind of freedoms do you want?”

  “The ability to talk to a coworker woman without being afraid that we will go to jail,” Hamid responds quickly.

  Naeem takes an interest in my work. He Googles my name and finds my undergraduate thesis on Afghan couples in the United States—a study of how changes in gender roles and identity have transformed the rules of marriage. I’m impressed by his open-mindedness and flattered that he is engaged by my controversial writings. We discuss his frustration with the conservatism of the culture in Herat, how women’s options are limited, and how he wishes they had more freedom. Our conversations take place as we work—I face my laptop and address him when I’m thinking out loud, and he responds while entering data on his desktop or fixing a hardware breakdown. We don’t face each other to speak directly for any extended period of time, and I do not remove my hijab in the office.

  “Did you see on Herat TV how women are burning themselves more because they have such miserable lives?” I ask him. “I just can’t understand how this society blames the woman.”

  “Women tend to be the most critical of each other,” he says. “This society doesn’t see that misery. They only know how to blame the woman. They don’t give women the rights they are given in Islam. Self-immolations are a form of protest.”

  “Parents need to understand that these women should have a choice and that they are also human beings.”

  Naeem is fond of literature and photography, and he’s a vegetarian—a rarity in Afghanistan. A technology expert and database administrator who knows how to repair most electronic equipment, he opened the first computer store in the city in 1999. Within four years, his family controlled the city’s hardware and software business through their Ibn-e-Sina shop. He learned his computer skills by taking courses in Iran and reading thousand-page instruction manuals from Microsoft and other Web sites. Then he taught the men in his family how to fix, buy, and sell technology. He seems to belong more in Silicon Valley than Herat, but I’m glad he lives in Herat, that there are men like him to break the stereotype of the close-minded Muslim male bent on oppressing women.

  I tell him about Ghoryan and how I plan to go back there when I return the following summer.

  “Why are you so interested in Ghoryan?”

  “The drug trade is a war few know about in Afghanistan, and Ghoryan tells the story of what’s actually happening inside the war. Maybe you can come and be my guide there. I always have to have a man as a guide to be safe in this country.”

  “Maybe,” he says with a shy smile, visibly pleased but taken aback by my brazen invitation.

  Chapter Five

  Meeting Darya

  Ghoryan is a district on the edge of destruction. Many of its residents are drug addicts, dealers, or widows. More than half of Ghoryan’s men are unemployed but work in the drug trade sporadically. No statistics exist to show exactly how much of the population is benefitin
g or suffering from the narcotics business. Drug lords rule the district, aided by a weak and corrupt local government. The drug lords hire husbands and sons to carry opium on foot and by donkey through the desert, where they risk coming under fire from Iranian border guards. Those who do make it across the border safely hand the drugs over to Afghan and Iranian dealers, who sell them in Iran, where they are then transported to Turkey, the Gulf, Europe, and, finally, the United States. But many couriers never return, as they are either killed in ambushes or executed in Iranian prisons. These men leave behind thousands of dollars in opium debt, which is inherited by the trade’s greatest victims: their wives and children. Drug lords knock on the widows’ doors demanding their opium money. Between 2001 and 2003, the number of women dousing themselves with accelerant and setting themselves on fire rose from two burnings a week to three, according to Ghoryan Hospital.

  After the Communist regime fell in 1992, many refugees returned to find that the only jobs available were in the drug trade—for all ethnicities, not just Pashtuns. What was once a business for a select few families thus became a source of income for perhaps half of Ghoryan district. Meanwhile, worldwide demand for opium and heroin also rose. With three to six million addicts, Iran became the world’s largest consumer of Afghanistan’s opium. In Europe, heroin became the drug of choice. As Afghanistan is closer to Europe than Burma or Southeast Asia, where most of the world’s suppy of opium was previously grown and exported, Afghan villages, especially those on the borders, began to drown in opium.

  Ghoryan is one of hundreds of Afghan villages that are links in the drug chain, and the devastation is visible everywhere there: in the unpaved roads, the dry riverbed, the bullet-riddled walls.

  Dr. Gol Ahmed Daanish, head of the hospital in Ghoryan, invokes Ghoryan’s history, citing the district as once a place of bravery and scholarship. Now all that has changed. “We’re the armpit of Herat province,” he says. “We’re considered the smugglers and thieves. Unfortunately, smuggling is the only income that has been encouraged during the Taliban years.” According to Daanish, Ghoryan’s geographical proximity to Iran has made the district a victim of the drug trade.

  Daanish, delicate and polished in his Western slacks and shirt, represents the small minority of educated residents fighting to change the district and its reputation. Several of the educated in Ghoryan have formed a council and they gather once a week to talk with the local government. They fight an uphill battle. The trend of trafficking has changed, Daanish says. “It was run by a few locals who are now dead or addicted. Now there are invisible drug mafias and bandits who control the trade, and people here have become the pawns.”

  Mr. Jawan is a proud member of one of the Pashtun tribes in Ghoryan. I ask his son Kamran, who’s visiting from Iran, to accompany me from Herat city to Ghoryan when I return in the summer of 2003.

  Painted stones, which mark the sites of land mines on the side of Afghan roads, are a normal traffic hazard in Afghanistan. Many of the stones on the narrow, unpaved road from Herat city to Ghoryan are red, indicating danger, with a few white stones marking areas that have been cleared of mines.

  “Are there any mines on the road itself?” I ask the driver, Abdul, an hour into the three-hour drive. “I mean, is it possible that your car could blow up right now?”

  Kamran, who sits in the passenger seat, interjects. “Don’t worry. The road has been cleared. Although I don’t recommend you come here by yourself. This has never been a safe road. Drug dealers are in charge of this road.”

  Kamran has lived in Iran with his wife, Abida, and son, Khalid, for ten years. He’s the only child of Mr. Jawan’s still living near Afghanistan. Mr. Jawan’s other three children are spread across Europe and the United States. Kamran travels back and forth between Iran and Afghanistan to see relatives or to do business, mainly managing his father’s properties. At thirty-six, he is just like his father: a smooth-talking, generous social animal. He loves to talk on the phone and tell stories. He has even inherited his father’s thick, dark hair and almond-colored skin. Mr. Jawan’s experiences in the drug trade are well known by his children, but Kamran, his father’s right hand, shuns that lifestyle now, and he isn’t forthcoming with information about his past involvement. His generosity and the fact that we were once neighbors will not allow him to shut me out completely, though. He has joined me on this trip to check on the farmers cultivating barley and cumin on the dozens of acres of land his family owns in Ghoryan district and to introduce me to Zamir Agha’s family, who will become my hosts for the next six weeks. Zamir Agha was Mr. Jawan’s loyal cook for ten years, and the two families have remained in contact.

  “Zamir Agha’s family lives a simple, Sufi-like lifestyle,” Kamran says. “They are very kind and giving people. His son Saber will take you wherever you need to go. You can trust him, but don’t get yourself in trouble. Opium smuggling is not what it used to be like, as my dad has described. People die every day because of it. I know you’re brave, but don’t be stupid.” He says this last part in a brotherly way.

  We reach Ghoryan. The central road in town is narrow, with adobe shops on both sides. The main intersection, a roundabout similar to that in other village centers I’ve visited in Afghanistan, features a rectangular concrete structure. Men lie around the shops in the afternoon, taking naps or watching who passes by. I see some drug addicts crouching lifelessly in alleyways, their hands held out for donations. The few women who appear in public are inside the fabric and jewelry stores. The elder ones wear the blue burqa, and the younger ones wear the black chador.

  Zamir Agha and his wife, Amina, and their six sons and three daughters live near the landmark fort in Ghoryan. Their house, which Zamir Agha owns, is a traditional mud-brick square structure with six large rooms, a kitchen, an outhouse, a small room for bathing, and a cement porch, all connected by a courtyard. The family’s water comes from the deep well in the courtyard, and they use a mobile gas stove. They have three hours of electricity every night, as dim as candlelight, powered by large generators operated by the town. Zamir Agha is in his fifties but still has enough energy to do construction work. His sons contribute to the family income by digging and reinforcing wells in remote parts of the desert, while he focuses on remodeling homes.

  One of Zamir’s middle sons is Saber, my guide in Ghoryan. His mother tells me that the twenty-year-old is hot-headed and stubborn. He’s also a newlywed. His wife, Tarana, has just joined the family. The couple has inherited the fanciest room in the house, with red velvet mats and matching curtains, but as soon as I arrive, the family gives me that room.

  My presence in their home and in the town becomes news. I’m a single girl wearing Western clothes inside the house and interacting openly with men not related to me. Rumors spread that I may be a spy working for the CIA, which locals call sazman-e-Siah, or “the black organization.” For some in town, my presence among non-kin men is shameful, and I can tell that Saber’s mother and wife are wary of me. They don’t say it, but they give me uncomfortable stares. I befriend them by conversing about our different worlds.

  Saber and I chat as we eat sweet watermelon on the porch. His wife sits nearby listening. He tells me, “When I went outside today, the shopkeepers couldn’t believe that you’re staying with us. I think they’re jealous that we have a guest from America. But I’m glad you’re here.” He yells to be heard over the muezzin announcing the call to evening prayer.

  “In America, men and women who are not related to each other sit together and eat and chat all the time,” I tell him. “It’s normal, and no one talks bad about it.”

  “Really?” Tarana asks. “They don’t wear hijab?”

  “No, they don’t cover their heads, but they also don’t wear bikinis when they meet in their homes.”

  We all laugh.

  “Isn’t it sinful for uncovered women to meet men like that?” Tarana inquires.

  “I don’t think so, but that’s for you to decide if you live there.
You have the choice to wear hijab,” I explain.

  “It would be nice to see America, but I don’t think I want to live there,” she decides.

  I try teaching Saber and his wife, who are both illiterate, how to speak a few words of English. I suggest that Tarana enroll in the local high school.

  “I would love that so much,” she says. Tarana’s much quicker to learn the words than Saber. She greets me with “hello” and says “good-bye” when I leave the house. But Saber’s not pleased by her intelligence. “She can’t go to school, because they don’t have room for married women. I’m glad, because I don’t want my wife to know more than me. That would be shameful,” he says in the loud wind blowing against our faces.

  A fierce wind cools Herat province in 100-degree summer temperatures. It is known as the 120-day wind because it blows for four consecutive months, hard enough to clear away the dust, freshen the air, and provide power through windmills. It’s an antidote to the stifling heat. The wind gusts swifter in Ghoryan than anywhere I’ve been in Herat, thrusting the dust into the Ghoryan River. Some Ghoryan residents believe that the wind will one day wreck the district. But the victims of the opium business say it is the drug that will wipe out the villages. Their apocalyptic prediction is that men will die trafficking on the border, those who stay behind will become addicts and eventually perish, and the children and women left behind will die of starvation.

  While Zamir Agha’s family is not involved in the opium trade, they are engulfed by it. Most of their neighbors and relatives have ties to it.

  Saber, a lanky, broad man with wild brown eyes, is not stubborn or hot-headed with me. He tells me he’s looking for an adventure. One evening as he and I wait for dinner to be served on the sofra, the plastic sheet laid on the floor for food to be served, I ask Saber what the worst part of the drug trade is for him. He takes only a second to answer.