Unembedded in Afghanistan

[Editor’s note: On May 29, 2010 this story won the Canadian Association of Journalists award as the country’s best Print Feature, the second CAJ prize Matthieu Aikins has won in two years. This piece is also one of five Coast articles selected as finalists for the 2010 Atlantic Journalism Awards. All five stories are collected here.]

At the border, the Amu Darya flows wide and sluggish, betraying
little of its origins on the glacial plateau of the High Pamirs in the
northern Himalayas. Winding its way through the vast plains of Central
Asia, it empties into the landlocked Aral Sea, to evaporate
there—-here, deep in the heart of the Asian continent, even the
rivers have no access to the oceans.

The Amu Darya marks the line between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
It’s spanned by the Friendship Bridge, once the main invasion route for
the Soviet army, now a conduit for international aid pouring south into
Afghanistan, seven years after the fall of the Taliban.

With the situation worsening by the day, with the country spiraling
downwards into violence and chaos, it had to be true, in a sense, that
there would be no better time to visit than the present. So I found
myself on the bridge contemplating the river, my backpack slung over my
shoulder, dallying for a last instant on the threshold of what would be
a month-long journey alone through the heart of Afghanistan.

A passing car slowed for me and I hopped in for the hour-long ride
south to Mazar-e Sharif. Crossing into Afghanistan from Uzbekistan is a
shock. The two border areas share a similar ethnic mix and, until the
last century, nearly identical histories. But today the difference is
stark. Uzbekistan, industrialized by the Soviets, is a largely secular
Muslim society struggling to modernize under a brutal dictatorship,
with nary a headscarf to be seen among its women. Afghanistan, with its
appalling poverty and its decrepit streets awash with weaponry and
wild-looking bearded men, feels like the frontier of civilization.

My ride dropped me at my hotel, the Aamo, near the shrine of Hazrati
Ali. The shrine, a Central Asian-influenced composition of lush blue
domes, inlaid mosaics and marble courtyards, is Afghanistan’s holiest
site: Afghans believe Imam Ali, son-in-law of Prophet Mohammad, is
buried there. It marks the heart of the city, with the garbage and
smog-filled streets of Mazar expanding outwards like clogged arteries,
pulsing with gaudily-painted buses, donkey carts and shouting sidewalk
vendors.

Despite its prime location, the Aamo was one of the cheapest dives
in the city—$10 a night got you a room with three or four beds. The
hallways seemed to be analogues of the open sewers outside, as guests
spat and threw their cigarette butts and waste into them. Yet the
hotel’s insalubrity was more than made up for by the kindness of its
staff. My arrival caused a stir—foreign travellers had just about
stopped coming in the past year, due to the deteriorating
security—and I soon found myself surrounded by group of young men
around the same age as me as I sipped a welcoming cup of tea, the
object of their curious stares.

“You are the first foreigner we have seen in a very long time,”
Abrahim, the hotel manager, explained.

The boys soon introduced me to the Afghan tradition of hospitality.
They adopted me as one of their own, taking me shopping for Afghan
clothes that would allow me to pass unnoticed in the streets (my
half-Japanese face blended in remarkably with the population) and
coaching along my fledgling Dari, the dialect of Persian spoken in
northern Afghanistan. I’d wander the warren-like bazaars with them and
in the evening we’d sometimes go out for hand-churned ice cream,
strolling, in the manner common among men here, hand-in-hand through
the glistening courtyards of the shrine.

Afterwards, I’d sit up chain-smoking by my window. At night the
shrine is lit up like a Vegas casino, its domes outlined in neon
lights, complete with flashing palm trees. I’d watch the flickering
streets, empty save for the big dogs that prowled them, and wonder what
exactly I was doing there.

The ostensible answer was that I had come to try to
understand what it was that Canadians were fighting and dying for here.
The past eight years in Afghanistan have been a case study in wasted
opportunity. Despite the total rout of the Taliban in 2001, despite the
arrival of countless nations and billions in aid, living conditions in
the country remain among the worst in the world, with a life expectancy
of 43 years. Worse, a full-blown insurgency has taken root,
particularly in the south, causing violence and casualties to
skyrocket. Confidence in the mission, both abroad and among Afghans,
has nearly evaporated.

Yet depression here is often accompanied by an equal measure of
inspiration, a disorienting mixture. At the university in Mazar, I met
two young English teachers, Fawzia and Nabila, charming women who were
among the first in their families to become literate. They invited me
to the office of the local women’s shelter, where they also worked.

The office was in an old part of town, and our taxi struggled to
reach it, crawling over the bulging, unpaved road at a slower pace than
the donkey carts passing us by. When we arrived in the courtyard of the
office, there was an older man in traditional garb arguing with the
guard. “He is one of the conflict parties,” Fawzia whispered to me.
“His daughter is in the safe house.”

The small, hidden safe house is the only women’s shelter in the
province. It hosts a dozen or so women and their young children, who
come seeking refuge from domestic violence and forced marriages.
Sometimes, they are referred there by the authorities at the shrine
when, in their desperation, the women throw themselves upon the holy
place for sanctuary.

“A woman cannot live alone in Afghanistan,” Huzia, the shelter’s
project manager, explained. “She either gets a divorce and goes back to
her parents’ house, or she must be married—-perhaps to a different
man. They have no third option.”

Huzia estimated that their small project reaches only a fraction of
women at risk. Afghanistan has one of the world’s most repressive
cultures towards women, and yet, when I joined the women who ran the
shelter for lunch, and saw them laughing over their soup bowls, their
scarves pushed back loosely on their heads, I couldn’t help but feel
that there was potential for change.

That night, Abrahim, the hotel manager, came to my room with a
confession. “I have met a merchant who brings people on ships to
countries. You don’t need a visa or papers,” he said.

If the health of a country can be measured by the desire of its
citizens to stay and build a future there, then Afghanistan is very
sick indeed. Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed some hope that they
might leave the country. Canada figured large in these dreams of
escape—often the first question Afghans asked me, upon learning my
nationality, was “How can I go?” They knew about our health care and
multiculturalism, and our supposedly lax refugee system was
legendary—we were an El Dorado.

The boys at the hotel—who earned around $50 a month—were filled
with fantasies of escaping abroad. But Abrahim was the most serious
among them. A melancholy young man with a wife and child, he was
restlessly bent on self-improvement, periodically asking questions
about English vocabulary or, in this case, illegal immigration. His
plan was to get seaman’s papers and travel to a Canadian port before
slipping into the country, declaring himself as a refugee or just
passing into the underground economy. The journey would cost him
$10,000.

“Is that too much?” he asked. I didn’t know, but said that kind of
money could support a poor family for a decade in Afghanistan. “I have
no future in this country,” he replied, his grey eyes locking on
mine.

KABUL—A CITY UNDER SIEGE

I woke before dawn and took a taxi to the outskirts of town,
where in the darkness a semicircle of buses sat huddled inwards like a
witches’ coven, their headlights illuminating a mass of touts,
passengers and luggage. After an hour of confusion, the buses left in
convoy along the highway south, and by the end of the day we were
arriving at the first of the heavily armed police checkpoints that
control access to Kabul.

I was picked up at the bus stop by AJ, a native of Kabul who would
become my friend and guide in the city. Whipping nimbly through the
anarchic traffic, his free hand swapping a diet pop and cigarette, AJ
told me how the international presence had come to define the city’s
economy.

“That’s where all the money is being made,” he said. “Off the
internationals.”

AJ knew from experience: with his fluent English and German, and his
knowledge of the two colliding cultures, he was making good cash off
the internationals’ inefficiency in the time-honoured role of a
middleman. He explained that local shopkeepers couldn’t deal with the
German bureaucracy, so the Germans would buy computers through him at a
20 percent commission.

AJ was part of a nouveau riche of Afghans whose livelihoods were
based on access: access to the internationals, to their contracts, to
their foreigners-only bars. He was also the first Afghan I met who
wasn’t keen on leaving the country. His parents had emigrated to
Ontario and wanted him to join them.

“They want me to come to Canada and marry an Afghan girl and settle
down.” He laughed and flicked his cigarette out the window. “But I
can’t leave. The money’s too good.”

I checked into a cheap hotel in the centre of town, near the
main drag known as Chicken Street. I was the only foreign guest, a
reminder the security situation in Kabul had worsened steadily since
the fall of the Taliban. Half behind barricades, the city was
shuddering under a procession of suicide bombings and assassinations,
as militants extended their reach throughout the capital.

As a result, foreigners were insulating themselves in ever
thickening layers of security precautions. They lived and worked mainly
in fortified compounds, shuttling back and forth in the late-model Land
Cruisers that stood out so clearly from the battered vehicles driven by
ordinary Afghans. Few of the internationals I spoke to had ever been to
the home of an Afghan—many were forbidden by their organizations even
to venture out on foot to the nearest corner store.

One day, I went out with Masoud, a friend of AJ’s who worked as a
veterinarian with demining dogs. We drove on his motorcycle out to some
of the poorer slums of Kabul, the ones crammed up on the hillsides
without electricity or running water.

There we visited the derelict hulk of the old Soviet Cultural
Centre. The place is a reminder of how Kabul looked at the end of the
last war. The structures are crumbling, their walls pitted with
machine-gun fire and torn away by explosives. On a Socialist Realist
mural at the entrance to the main hall, Lenin’s face has been chipped
away, but in the corner you can still see peasant women raising
Kalashnikovs in victory salutes.

The large, walled compound has become Kabul’s drug district, where
about 700 addicts and dealers conduct their business unmolested by
police. Not all the opiates produced in Afghanistan are exported: The
rapid rise in addiction rates is partially a result of returning
refugees who picked up the habit abroad. The UN estimates that
Afghanistan is second in the region, after Iran, in terms of per capita
opiate consumption.

It didn’t take long for our presence there to be detected, not only
by the skinny, skulking inhabitants, but by an overweight, mustachioed
cop who angrily berated us for photographing in what he falsely claimed
was a restricted area. He was fishing for a bribe, and when Masoud
refused to pay he declared us under arrest and bundled us in van off to
the station. When we got there, I pulled out my cellphone and insisted
that I call my embassy. Seeing me arguing with the guards, the gate
corporal ran over and began striking me in the face, until his comrades
restrained him with horrified shouts of “No! He’s Canadian!”

We were hauled into the station to face the district’s police chief,
Karinail Samsoor. My beating had shifted the power dynamic: now they
were apologetic, and a little scared. “I am very sorry about that,”
Samsoor told me. “He thought that you were an Afghan.” I tried to
protest that he was missing the point, but Masoud just shook his head
and accepted the apology on my behalf. “It is common among Afghans,” he
explained later, with a shrug. In an entire country suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder, physical violence was an everyday
thing.

At a wedding in Kabul, I chanced to meet Mohammad Shohab
Hakimi, director of the Mine Detection Centre. A wealthy and respected
Afghan who had worked in humanitarian demining since the ’80s, Hakimi
knew the backstory of all the big players and was full of opinions on
the current situation. We chatted as the younger boys danced for the
entertainment of the men (the women were in their own section of the
wedding hall), and afterwards Hakimi invited me to visit him at the
centre.

The next day, I sat down in his big, well-furnished office, though
not before admiring, at his prompting, the photos of him with Gerhard
Schroeder and Mohammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan. After
partaking in the obligatory cup of tea, we got down to business.

“We had two years of peace,” Hakimi said, a note of mourning
creeping into his affable tone. He shook his head at what he perceived
to be the failures of the US and its allies in the immediate aftermath
of the Taliban’s downfall. “And it was wasted. You see how much they
have lost, all their political prestige, and they have given Russia and
China the courage to start coming.”

The international community had put wrong men in charge, Hakimi
continued, former warlords and cynical Afghan emigres who were allowed
to run loose. The result was rampant corruption and a government that
had almost totally lost its credibility both inside the country and
abroad, a process that would later culminate in the elections, now
widely seen as fraudulent.

There had been a recent study by the coordinating body for NGO
groups in Afghanistan, which had reported that 40 percent of the aid
money spent had been repatriated in consultants’ salaries and company
profits. “The money comes here, and then it goes back,” Hakimi said.
Yet the aid business was vital to Afghanistan. “Without the
international community, we can’t survive.”

We walked into the centre’s sprawling compound. “Through all the bad
times, I never contemplated leaving Afghanistan. But now, with my
children getting older…” Hakimi sighed. “My daughter told me the
other day ‘Baba, we waste our time here.'”

INTO THE WILD WEST

My plan had been to leave Afghanistan via Herat, a major city
in the west near the border with Iran. There were regular flights there
from Kabul, but that seemed like cheating. Yet everyone I spoke to told
me not to go west overland, not alone, not as a foreigner. Even my
travelling alone through the cities was regarded, by most of the
internationals I spoke to, as somewhat insane. To cross the mountains
of central Afghanistan by van and truck was a voyage not even my
friends in Kabul would consider.

There are two main routes overland to Herat. The fast way is the
long loop south over paved highway through Kandahar and Helmand. It’s
extremely dangerous for foreigners, with armed Taliban checkpoints a
regular occurrence. Even ordinary Afghans risk their lives by
travelling that road: while I was in Kabul, 23 civilians were pulled
off a bus and executed by the Taliban, on suspicion of working for the
government.

The slow way is a straight shot west through the rugged mountain
ranges of central Afghanistan, a four-to-six day journey over
serpentine dirt trails. Grueling as it is, it passes through what has
until recently been considered safer, if desolate, territory. But with
the security situation in the country deteriorating, the route had
become exposed to bandits and militants.

I took the slow way, which passed up into the town of Bamiyan. In
some alternate universe, Bamiyan would make for a first-class tourist
destination. Nestled in a fertile valley at 2,800 metres, its gorgeous
mountain scenery hosts a wealth of early Buddhist shrines and caves, as
well as two very large, conspicuously empty alcoves carved into the
cliffs—the places of the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the
Taliban in 2001.

I met up with Yama Ferozi and Yaghya Ghaznawi, two Afghans working
for a Japanese-funded literacy program, and drove down the valley with
them out to the little villages the program served, small clusters of
mud and brick houses with piles of dry sheep dung stacked in front of
them as fuel for the coming, bitter winter.

This is one of the poorest and least-developed places in the world.
Afghanistan ranks at or near the bottom of nearly every UN social and
economic indicator. Less than a third of the population is literate,
less than a quarter has access to safe drinking water.

At the village of Sorkh Dar, we pulled up in front of a group of
nine men who were squatting by the main road, watching the sparse
traffic. Ferozi and Ghaznawi started unloading notebooks and pencils
for the village’s literacy program; I asked the group how many of them
could read. They pointed at one of the younger men, who shuffled his
feet sheepishly. “He can,” an elder said.

I asked if they had any jobs now that the harvest had been brought
in. “Do you think we would be standing here if we did?” the elder
replied. A group of children gathered to stare. I looked at their thin,
ragged clothing and wondered how they managed to survive winters at
this altitude. “The boredom is worse than the cold,” another of the men
offered. Access to these villages would be nearly cut once the snow
started falling.

On the way back, Ferozi spoke enthusiastically of how programs like
this provided a key first step in breaking the cycle of poverty, though
he wondered what opportunities would exist for the students in the
absence of further development. The day also came with disappointments:
he discovered several of the teachers and their supervisors had not
been showing up to class. “They don’t even want to help themselves,” he
sighed.

From Bamiyan, my trip into the wilderness began in earnest. I
was leaving the relative safety of the Hazarajat, and I now had to shed
my identity as a Canadian, something associated both with extreme
wealth and the troops fighting in Kandahar. I had traded my knapsack
for a cheap shoulder bag, and with my beard, knee-length gown, baggy
trousers and turban, I looked like just another poor Afghan traveller.
Still, my limited Dari meant that anyone who had a proper conversation
with me would realize that I was a foreigner—and so I became Abdul
Aziz, a migrant labourer from Kazakhstan heading to Iran for work.

I caught another van west to the town of Yowkowlang, where I learned
that there was no onward transport until the next morning, when the
“Kontenor” truck passed through. So it was time to face my first night
in a chaikhana. The chaikhana, which means “teahouse” in Dari, is a
staple of rural travel in Afghanistan. They generally consist of a
single, open room, where for the price of a meal—about a dollar or
two—you get to sleep on the floor, sharing the carpet with anywhere
between a dozen and 30 other rough-looking travellers.

Evenings in the chaikhana follow a well-worn ritual. As the sun goes
down, everyone washes and prays west towards Mecca. Then a generator
sputters on outside, and someone flicks on the TV—usually Afghan
news, or a dubbed Turkish soap opera. Long plastic mats were spread on
the floor, and we settled into a dish of mutton and rice, eating with
our hands. Afterwards, the travellers would lounge in small groups and
talk amongst themselves, sipping tea and spitting noss, a
vile-tasting, greenish tobacco.

When I told them I was going all the way to Herat, they’d cluck and
shake their heads at the danger. “Two men from Kabul were killed on
that road last week,” a truck driver told me that first night in
Yowkowlang. We’d all nod silently at each other—somehow, sharing the
danger that was their reality made me feel closer to them.

The next morning, I woke in the frigid hours before sunrise and
found the “Kontenor” truck—an ancient, Soviet-built Komoz with a
shipping container on its flatbed. I negotiated a seat in the cab with
the driver and we headed west. Dawn was breaking, and the rising sun
illuminated a line of jagged mountains ahead in the distance.

The rugged dirt road that we travelled would take us up over them,
crawling up breathtaking passes and skirting through agonizingly narrow
gorges. Once, we had to clear a small avalanche from the road by hand.
There were hardly any other vehicles on the road, just laden donkeys
and flocks of fat-tailed sheep and their shepherds. It seemed like a
land lost to time, until you remembered how the ravages of geopolitics
had swept across it, again and again.

After three days of travelling, we arrived in the little
alpine town of Chaghcharan, capital of Ghor province. This was as far
as my ride was going, and I hunkered down in a chaikhana to plot my
next move.

I didn’t remain unmolested for long. As a young Kazakhstani
travelling alone with a big blue shoulder bag, I fit the profile of a
foreign jihadist pretty well. My first night in Chaghcharan, an older
man followed by a Kalashnikov-toting youth came in and demanded to see
my documents. He held my Canadian passport upside down for a bit and
seemed satisfied. My friend the truck driver was seething. “He has no
right to do that,” he said. “He’s just traffic police.”

The next day, men from the Directorate of National Security showed
up and took me away to their base for questioning. Caught between my
Canadian documents and my Kazakh cover story, I spun a complicated
fable about my Kazakhstani mother and Canadian father, and was
released, but a day later I was briefly arrested by local
anti-terrorism police—an A for vigilance, I suppose, but an F for
inter-agency coordination.

A greater worry was the final two-day stretch from Chaghcharan to
Herat. The chaikhanas on the way over had been full of stories about
how Mullah Mustafa, a former mujihadin commander-cum-warlord, had
recently broken with the central government and set his men loose.
Travellers coming in from the west had seen gunmen on the road, near
the border of the two provinces. Paranoia began to set it, and I
watched my fellow travellers uneasily—with ransoms for foreigners
nearing a half-million dollars, an Afghan could feed his family for a
lifetime with a phone call tipping off militants or bandits to a
kidnapping opportunity.

In the midst of all this cloak-and-daggery, I sneaked out to the
base of the local Provincial Reconstruction Team, making my way through
a maze of concrete walls and machine-gun nests to the inner gate of the
compound, where I was met by Lt. Ruta Gaizutyte, the team’s young press
officer.

The 200-strong, mainly Lithuanian PRT is responsible for assisting
security and development in Ghor Province, and to that end they
participate in medical programs and distribute aid through local Afghan
institutions. Gaizutyte made us some tea, and gawped as I started
cramming down Lithuanian cookies—I had been eating rice and mutton
for a week. I asked her what she thought of the mission.

Her blue eyes lit up. “People back home ask what are we doing, why
are we here, but when you go out to the villages and you are able to do
something for these people who have nothing, well,” she gushed.

Ghor has traditionally been a safe province, but lately things have
worsened. With full-scale insurgencies in nearby Helmand, Farah and
Badgis provinces, attacks here have been on the increase, including
several rocket strikes on the base itself.

“This has been the most difficult rotation in the history of this
PRT,” Gaizutyte admitted. They’d recently had their first fatality:
when the news that a US sniper in Iraq had used a Koran for target
practice surfaced, there had been an angry demonstration here in front
of the base. A hidden gunman had opened fire during the riot, and two
civilians and a Lithuanian soldier were killed.

“Someone used the Koran incident for their own purpose here,” she
said, speculating that it might be Mullah Mustafa. Mustafa, with his
ambiguous relationships to both the Taliban and to the central
government, is a good illustration just how complex the situation is in
Afghanistan. There’s no simple division between Kabul and the Taliban,
with the insurgency itself composed of a shifting and decentralized mix
of tribal militants, Pakistan-based Talibs and foreign jihadists.
Moreover, the old regional powers that had carved Afghanistan up after
Soviets were getting their courage back—including warlords like
Mustafa, who had supposedly been disarmed under a UN program in
2005.

“The NGOs are already leaving,” Gaizutyte said. “If the situation
gets worse, we won’t be able to do a lot of the work we are doing
now.”

It was time to bite the bullet. I was crouched in my funk
hole at the chaikhana in Chaghcharan, running impossible odds
calculations through my head as I contemplated the journey west.

Jafari, a friend I made in the chaikhana, tried to reassure me.
“Abdul Aziz, you are a good Muslim man,” he told me one evening, seeing
the stressed look on my face. “Allah is your keeper.”

I left the next morning in a Toyota TownAce, packed in shoulder to
shoulder with 19 other travellers. We followed the Sarjangal River
through its narrow gorges all the way back down onto the plains,
stopping for the night in the village of Obe, near the border of Herat
and Ghor provinces.

We didn’t see any gunmen, except at the scrubby little police
checkpoints that were more like toll booths—a cop would lope out of
the hut, cradling his Kalashnikov, and collect a few bills from the
driver before waving us through. In all fairness, there were two
serious stops where they made most of the men get out and answer
questions. I hid in the van with a couple of elderly men who were
making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Otherwise, I passed those two days in careful silence, looking out
the window at the blur of lonely villages and desolate landscapes.
These were lives being lived beyond the sphere of my own comprehension,
according to patient, age-old rhythms barely interrupted by war or
disaster. And yet, give these people a generation in the cities and
their children would understand and yearn for all the trappings of
modernity. If there was a universality in human nature that shone out
from the wildly discordant juxtapositions I was experiencing, it was
this, that yearnings two thousand years apart might merge as one in
less than a lifetime.

Soon, I’d arrive in Herat, splurge on a decent hotel, and scrub the
grime of two weeks in the mountains off under a scalding shower. I was
leaving Afghanistan, I could leave Afghanistan, there was an entire
safe, modern world out there that would fling open its gates for my
passport. And it would become easy to forget, perhaps, what I felt so
keenly now, in that hot fusion of bodies and dust rattling along a
mountain trail: that we are all bound to this earth together, and she
does not forget, in the end, to call us home.

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This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.