An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (18 page)

“Why did you leave Afghanistan?”

“The Russians beat me up because I was not loyal to the Karmal
regime,” said the man. “And I had not enough firearms—only one rifle for five, six males in the family, so we could not protect our womenfolk and children to be safe.”

“Are you happy here?”

“No, we are no happy.”

“Do you have any request to make of the Americans?”

“Tell them that we are very grateful for what the Americans are doing, and we say, God be with them.”

Looking back, I am appalled at the unimaginativeness of my questions. I remember that I
wanted
to ask everyone the same things (“Are you happy here in the camps?” —“Why did you leave Afghanistan?” —“How could the United States best help you?”), because I was looking for some underlying structure or other to explain things. Then I could draw a blueprint showing where the refugee money came from, itemized down to the cent; I could draw elegant flow lines showing where it went: to a diamond entitled
“RELIEF,”
to a wide thin rectangle called
“CORRUPTION
”—and I could
logically
determine from this exactly how much was needed, and what was needed. (If ninety percent of the Afghans I asked said that they needed guns, I would try to send them guns.
^‖
) The next step would be to calculate how efficient the workings of the Mujahideen parties were, and which party was the best to support; from these and related computations I could begin the totaling of broader-based sums to discover who Afghans, Soviets, Pakistanis were … when all they were was people.

To get the Overall Picture, you also talk to officials. Through a friend of the General’s who worked at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, the Young Man arranged an interview with Marie Sardie, the U.N.H.C.R. nutritionist. —The Young Man she found slightly bewildering. —“Now, what is your purpose here?” she said at one point. “Is your purpose to increase aid for the refugees, or decrease aid for the refugees, or what?” —The Young Man replied that he wanted only to determine what exactly the refugees needed, and whether they were getting more or less than that. If they were getting less, then he would say in his presentation (which you are now reading)
^a
that more should be sent. If they were getting more, then clearly he need not trouble himself with
that
problem. —This sort of fact-finding is essential to the draftsmen of arbitrary curves. —I for my part am probably even more irresponsible, since in my hesitation to draw arbitrary curves I forget that some curves are not arbitrary, that living, breathing life demands its due, which was hardly what it got when, for instance, I was picking apricots from a tree in Afghanistan with my friend Suleiman and found that I was standing on a human jaw with the flesh still on it, the flesh of a person killed by another person brought specially to kill him by people with their own great dues of state to pay; and I will never forget how blue the sky was. So let me pose a non-arbitrary question for the Young Man to ask Marie Sardie in her pleasant office in Peshawar: Are the Afghan refugees in the camps receiving enough nutrition to sustain life and to keep them—men, women, children—physically and mentally healthy? —Of course, replies the Young Man, if your seemingly
straightforward question is broken down into its component atoms and particles, the arbitrariness of it comes to light; you see that, don’t you? That must be why your reflection is staring back at me so sadly from the darkness in the window. Yessir, Heisenberg was right, for consider: Whether or not the refugees
receive
enough, what proportion of what we give them goes to them, and what proportion is sold by Pakistanis in the stores at Saddar? How much of what gets to the camps is distributed fairly? —Surely such matters are subject to some ethical calculus, though what the axia of it are would be wretchedly difficult to say. —Is handing out rations year after year a satisfactory method of feeding people? If they don’t eat their own food, does something in them go unfed? —And how much from the rations is taken into Afghanistan with the Mujahideen? And is that fair? —Mujahideen are also refugees; many of them are registered at the camps, and they have as much of a right as any other refugees to the supplies provided—possibly more, since the idea of Afghans as refugees-in-perpetuity is repugnant to all of us who believe that the invasion was wrong, and the Mujahideen are at least trying to use those supplies to regain their homeland, and thus end their dependence on our subsidies. One has to respect them for that; and yet, is it right for the Mujahideen to eat U.N.I.C.E.F. tablets of condensed milk intended for their children? It seems to
me
right, but maybe it wouldn’t to U.N.I.C.E.F. —Round and round, round and round went such butterflies in the Young Man’s amoeba-ridden stomach; now these questions make me impatient, because, having resolved that the Afghans are in the right, and knowing that waste and corruption exist everywhere, I don’t care how many tons of supplies are diverted to uses other than feeding the refugees, as long as the refugees have enough; I cannot be bothered to wish that everything were perfect when all that I wish is that I never had to find that jaw beneath the apricot tree, with the flies on its one black lip; if I had the power, I would send them tons of food and missiles and tanks and airplanes and not worry about where they all went, because here the end justifies the means. It has to. And, so believing, I relinquish that aspect of innocence known as good faith, and my dreams are just a little stained; no doubt that is why the
Young Man’s reflection is looking so sadly at me in the mirror. (Until he went to Afghanistan, he had scarcely even fired a gun!)

So the Young Man sat in Marie Sardie’s office, drinking her tea and asking somewhat hesitant and ill-informed questions, to which she gave entirely reasonable answers. She could not satisfy him, but then no one could, and, being unable to take that leap of faith which is really a fall, he was unable to help anyone.

“No one can say what their health is like subclinically,” she said, “but clinically it’s not too bad. The service they get is much better than the local, and it’s far,
far
better than what they get in Afghanistan. They’ve all got food and schooling and shelter and water supplies—some facilities, anyway—and the medical coverage is at least once a week. Now in Afghanistan they’d be lucky if they saw an orthodox doctor once in their lifetime … And this causes a lot of friction between the refugees and the locals. There’s no way the U.N.H.C.R. budget would be healthy enough to integrate the local facilities with our own program. But in some cases we’ve been trying to make the medical dispensaries available to the locals
and
the refugees. But the refugees don’t usually like that; and so many times the dispensary tends to be in the center of the camp.”

Some Pakistanis didn’t actually like the refugees so much. Sometimes they wouldn’t even give them water.

The Young Man edged the tape recorder closer. —“Do you think that equity would dictate that these extras be cut back to the level of the local population?” he asked. He considered himself very precise.

“In the immediate future, no,” she replied, “in the long-term future, maybe. Look what’s happened with the Tibetan refugees. They get much less than the local population, because who’s interested in Tibetan refugees? But at the moment the donor countries are still extremely generous toward the Afghan refugees. But who knows what it’s going to be like in five years, ten years? And there are pockets of malnutrition throughout the frontier, but that’s not because they’re refugees; they have this cultural habit that you don’t feed solid foods to the infants until they’re around at least two years of age,
^b
so it’s survival of the fittest. The strong ones live, and the weak ones”—she shrugged—“just die away.” —The Young Man nodded and gulped his tea. The fan in the office felt very, very nice. —“In some areas we’re trying to institute solid feedings to infants six months of age and older; it’s very difficult,” Marie Sardie said. “And the women, some of them, tend to be malnourished because of the repeated pregnancies; and also, as you know, the females in this part of the world have got absolutely no value at all. If the women keep producing female children, the husband doesn’t really care if the children die, or if the wife dies; you can always get another wife who hopefully will give you male children.”

Levi said that men sometimes parked their wives like cars when they went somewhere, eyes facing the wall, and left them there for two hours.

Marie Sardie had her own office and car and chauffeur so that it would be clear to all that she fulfilled the official functions of a man. But Mary McMorrow didn’t. Mary was an I.R.C. nurse.

“There was one camp where I was ordered not to return because their women were seeing me,” she said. “They were just
seeing
me. They’re mostly rural people who’ve lived in the hills or been out with their sheep all their lives, and this is new: when they see a woman coming in driving a car, when they see a woman telling someone something and they’ll do it for her, it causes them a lot of trouble.”

At noon the Young Man accompanied Mary to a dispensary tent through whose square sun-choked doorway little brown boys with cropped heads stood staring with dark eyes, frowning or sucking thumbs; behind them old men in white squatted patiently; and inside sat a weary pretty health worker in white, her desk being the white-covered examination table upon which lay her scissors in a steel box of disinfectant, her squeeze bottle of alcohol, her tray jumbled full of cotton and pills; and a refugee, tanned, handsome, unshaven, came before her and was awarded his TB medication, and then came another and another. Only 64 children had been vaccinated since morning. Mary said that in Thailand her team had vaccinated 500 a day. The Pakistani administrator used the phrase “motivation” defensively. A driver was being bawled out for misusing a truck. There was an argument about receipts, which went on and on in the 110° heat. Mary walked up, grabbed two or three children at random, and looked at their arms. All vaccinated; everything was okay. —From the window of the tent could be seen a well, a mosque (which resembled a tin-roofed barn), a dirty mother with her dirty infant, and dirty staring children, one without pants.

“The vaccines aren’t being kept cool enough,” Mary said.

“It’s not my fault!” shouted the immunologist, who was Pakistani. He began barking orders. “Everything here is no good,” he said. “We don’t have enough of anything! Why won’t the Americans give more funds for the refugees?”

“Pakistan refused the aid before,” Mary said. “The Americans went ahead and spent the money on something else.”

“Well, the U.S. should manage its money better,” said the immunologist triumphantly. He stared Mary in the face.

“The women are the most neglected, the women are the most anemic, the women have the highest level of tuberculosis; the women in general are in pretty bad shape,” said Mary. “According to our standards, they’re treated pretty bad. According to their standards, they’re treated as they expect to be treated. Traditionally, the Afghan men get the best of the food, which is then passed down to the children, and the women eat last, what’s left over, if anything. There are certain long-standing taboos: women in some of the tribes won’t eat meat or vegetables, because they think they’re bad for them. So what they basically live on is sweet bread and green tea.

“A woman’s life is really less than an animal’s. A camel or a water buffalo is valued more than a woman in this society. You can’t get a husband to donate blood for his wife because if you take his blood you take his life, but if she dies he can always get another wife.

“Last week a woman delivered her baby, but retained the placenta for more than twenty-seven hours, which is a very serious—lethal—problem. You continually bleed. It was just herself and this little old lady who happened to be around. And by the time we found her she was in shock from loss of blood. We had to rehydrate her; we had to give her drugs to stabilize her blood pressure; we had to do a lot of heroics to keep this woman alive. And, you know, we stabilized her and she was on her way to recovery and her husband came in (it was the first time that we had seen him in the five hours that we were in the tent). And the only thing he had to say was, ‘How am I going to get water since
she
is useless for me?’ ”

But unlike me, Mary accomplished something. She had saved that woman. She taught mothers to breast-feed longer, to mash bananas and feed them to their little children…

“So maybe attempts to make them more self-reliant haven’t been a complete failure?” asked the Young Man so hopefully.

“There have been no real attempts to make them more self-reliant,” Marie Sardie said. “Any such attempts have been on the refugees’ own initiative. It’s very difficult, because in the beginning you’re just trying to alleviate your own caseload. You give them goods, like charity. You kill their pride and integrity; you make them professional beggars and parasites. When you give them something for nothing, why should they work for it? But those refugees who are interested in doing their own thing do it. They help out in the dispensaries and with the distributions; they help the staff. Because basically they’re bored. They’re fed and watered and clothed, so what can they do with their time except look at the empty space? So a lot of them have set up little kitchen gardens and shops where you can buy food and cigarettes, detergents and soap …”