Human Cargo (43 page)

Before I caught my plane back to Dubai, Nasir took me to see a
friend in government, Nabi Farahi, deputy minister of finance, whom he had known a quarter of a century earlier, when both were students at the university. Farahi sat out the Taliban years as a professor of Pashtu, lying low when others provoked the Taliban. A charming, bespectacled, bearded man in his sixties, he offered melon to counteract the intense heat of his unair-conditioned office, apologizing for the lack of elevator, telephone, computer, carpet, or fan. To wipe up the melon juice, he sent his assistant to fetch unused forms from previous governments. Farahi is appalled at the speed with which the refugees are coming home. “We have nothing for them yet,” he said. “No jobs, no houses. This country doesn’t work. It is too soon.” Like all Afghans in positions of some authority, he worries when he sees the few good jobs going to men who have come back from exile with skills those who stayed behind had no chance to learn, and at the way that the foreign aid organizations are casually poaching the best people with salaries that can run to fifty times those the bankrupt Afghan state can offer. “I would like to see some dignity in the way people are returning,” he said, licking melon juice from his fingers. “It is only chaos.” It was Farahi who first mentioned to me the resentment many Afghans feel about how so much money has been promised, and so little visibly delivered.

Within six months, well over a million people had heeded Karzai’s calls and UNHCR’s promises and come home; this was more than had been expected for the entire year. At this rate, there would be 2 million by the time the snows came, returned to a country without houses, roads, schools, hospitals, water, or electricity. “I see our job as software,” said a man working for the UN. “We are trying to provide the rewiring of the system, but we will not be here to run it. The Afghans have to learn to do it for themselves.” For their part, the Afghans fear that the West will not fulfill its promises. As they watch the Land Cruisers speeding along the dusty roads, they remind one another that the West had promised things before, when they wanted the Soviets out, but that once the Soviets had gone, the West did not seem quite as committed as before.

Out on the Shomali plain, Haji Kamal is very conscious of the
fragility of the transitional government and the power of the encircling warlords, and of the coming winter, when snow, and winds no longer broken by trees, will turn his valley into a harsh and forbidding place. It was in the next few months, he said, that Afghanistan’s future would be decided.

•   •   •

ALMOST EXACTLY A
year later, I went back to Afghanistan to see how the refugees had survived their first winter. I wanted to find Abdul, the ebullient small boy who had led me through the dusty alleys of West Kabul; to see whether Jawad had won his place at the university; and whether Haji Kamal and Amar Jan had rebuilt their houses in the Shomali plain and were growing grapes for raisins once again. I had heard that the Hazara weavers’ school was flourishing. Nasir, to whom I spoke from time to time on the telephone, told me that he had reoccupied his family home in the center of Kabul, but that there was nothing but confusion over the awarding of the lucrative contracts for roads, telephones, and electricity. He was still hesitating, flying in and out of Kabul on Ariana’s ancient jet, trying to gauge the stability of the new Afghanistan. He could not quite make up his mind how far to commit himself, he kept saying, over the crackling line. Money was pouring into the city, houses were being built and fetching enormous rents, but there was no certainty anywhere. No one felt safe. Only the foreign aid specialists, he said, seemed in control, and even they would soon be leaving.

Flying in low over the bare mountains, I found the airport still pitted with shell holes, the burned-out tanks still in their places along the runways. Inside the terminal, the chaos was unchanged, but pictures of General Masood, the Northern Alliance warlord assassinated in the closing days of Taliban power, have replaced the earlier notices about land mines. On my plane were two middle-aged Afghan brothers. They had fled the city twenty-four years before and were now bringing the body of their father home for burial in a Kabul he had never been able to visit in his long years in exile. They were uneasy, talkative. In their pockets were the deeds to the
family house, long since occupied by others, over which they anticipated one of the fierce property wrangles in which many returnees have been ensnared.

We landed in Kabul soon after a flight from Frankfurt, bearing additional prosperous returnees, businessmen and engineers and academics who have made lives in the West and were now, like my friend Nasir, coming back to see the lay of the land. An elegant Afghan woman in her forties, with many trunks, dressed in a stylish combination of Afghan and Western dress, struggled to find her luggage.
“Entshuldige”
(Sorry), she was saying loudly, pushing her way through the Afghan porters with their turbans and flat hats,
“Entshuldige, entshuldige”
A young Afghan man with a strong American accent, crew cut, cocky, and bemused, was telling all who will listen that this was his first visit to Kabul and that he had come to meet a grandmother he had never seen. His real name is Mohamed, but he likes to be called Mo. Born and bred in Manhattan, Mo was incredulous and a little scornful of the chaos. “This is not really my place, you know. I don’t belong here.”

Kabul, I wrote that night in my diary, has changed little in a year. There is more razor wire on foreign and United Nations buildings; there are more women wearing burqas, a sign of the diminished faith most Afghans now have in an independent future in which women would be free to be bold. The crowds are thicker and the city is dirtier and dustier, Kabul’s population having apparently doubled to 2.5 million people. And the Land Cruisers are now lost in a permanent traffic jam of taxis, trucks, old cars, donkeys, and bicycles. The pollution is so bad that to live in Kabul, it is said by foreign residents, is to smoke the equivalent of forty-five packs of cigarettes a day. There are many more beggars, mostly women in burqas with babies, and small boys are selling tattered copies of a U.S. Marine training manual by the roadside. A hundred thousand returnees are apparently squatting in the ruins of the city, destitute. Afghanistan is still, in the language of the aid world, a SCCPI, a “situation of chronic conflict and political instability,” its people short of food and vulnerable to disease, physical assault, and forced displacement.

But there are roses out along the avenues leading into the city, and over a garden wall I saw a pink lavatera in flower. The fruit sellers have watermelons and mangoes, and the policeman was still where I had left him, directing traffic from a purple plush sofa, perched on a raised dais in the middle of the road. In the UN compounds geraniums and zinnias are growing, watered by channels cut out of the earth, and in the bazaar are new photograph shops, showing the unveiled faces of young women. Masood’s hawklike, brooding, unsmiling face is on every billboard.

Though the city is bustling and full of energy, in a state of constant rebuilding and activity, the refugees, it is said, have become cautious. When the snows had melted and the migrations began again, in March 2003, they did not flock home in anything like the same numbers as the previous year and as it had been feared they would. They have neither been pushed by increased intolerance in Pakistan and Iran, nor pulled by promises of work and houses. The tales of resettlement that have traveled back over the mountains have not been altogether happy ones, and the numbers arriving at Pulicharki daily in their brightly painted buses are said by the UN to be down to six hundred. Also, something has been done to curb those who traveled back and forth over the border, again and again, each time collecting money and rations, soap and plastic sheeting from the World Food Programme and UNHCR. A sophisticated machine that photographs the iris of each returnee and keeps a print on a database has been introduced.

The Hazaras have been hard at work rebuilding West Kabul. Along the road leading out to the weavers’ school, timber and brick merchants are doing a brisk trade. If the city buildings are still shells, their jagged walls in ruins, the side streets are by contrast full of builders and carpenters. The reconstruction of the capital is said to be in the hands of wealthy returnees, or warlords and their commanders, eager to control the money and the patronage all these projects entail. Aziz, the energetic young Hazara who is much involved in his people’s return, had come to the airport to meet me and the friend with whom I was traveling, Frances D’Souza. He said
that some 300,000 Hazaras have already returned to West Kabul, where his school now has 870 pupils, studying in two shifts, and that it has moved to a new compound, a series of classrooms built of cinder block, an innovation brought back with returning refugee builders from Pakistan and judged greatly superior to the old Afghan mud and straw. More than half his pupils, Aziz said with pride, are girls, and in the evening, when the rooms are given over to classes in literacy, he could fill his center six times over with women queuing for the education denied them by the Taliban. Aziz notes these numbers with delight. “People have come home from Pakistan and Iran believing that education is their passport to a better life.” He is teaching humanism and human rights and what he calls a benevolent interpretation of the Koran to his top class, tightly packed rows of serious young men and women.

In the alleys behind the school, in among the building sites and timber merchants, the carpet trade is booming. Aziz believes that there are at least six hundred factories, some employing as many as five hundred weavers, mostly working in their own homes, the patterns drawn out by young apprentice draftsmen on graph paper and quickly memorized by the children at the looms. The work is slow: five to six hours weaving every day except Friday, precise, meticulous work that needs small fingers and affects the eyes and lungs, but brings in enough money to support the entire family. The looms stand in the cool, under the pomegranate bushes and the vines. It takes four months for a family to weave a carpet three yards wide and four yards long. In Aziz’s school, the children talk of their futures as doctors, teachers, and engineers.

Not all the foreign experts who have made Kabul their base— there are said to be over a thousand registered NGOs alone—are as sanguine as Aziz about the country’s future. In February 2003, four months before my return, a Brazilian working for the International Committee of the Red Cross was stopped on a busy road outside Kandahar by a militia group. The commander, recognizing the Red Cross painted on the front of the Land Cruiser, pointed to his false leg and thanked the Brazilian for having saved his life during an earlier
skirmish. A Red Cross team, he told him, had been on hand and had amputated his leg; otherwise he would surely have died. Then, taking from his pocket a mobile telephone, the commander called his warlord. He spoke, listened, came back, drew out his gun, and shot the Brazilian dead.

Incidents like this have made foreigners wary and no one, now, feels safe. Within the UN compounds, behind the razor wire and the concrete pillars, there is talk of how much can be achieved for Afghanistan and how quickly, before the money runs out and with it the political will to restore such an ailing country to a semblance of democratic rule. Only, they add, it is of course not so much a question of restoration as of imposition. Afghanistan never was a democracy; it was, and is, a loose federation of tribal fiefdoms, ruled over by powerful warlords, and thus it seems set to remain. Andrew Wilder is a British academic who has lived in Afghanistan off and on for many years. Early in 2002, he arrived in Kabul with a small monitoring unit, funded by the Swiss and the Swedes, and a remit to do something seldom done in UN circles: analyze data on the spot. Wilder is not happy with what he sees around him. Over fourteen months, he has watched the UN agencies bicker over priorities and chains of command, nongovernmental organizations proliferate and go their own ways, and more attention and money go to the easier and more visible problems than to the more difficult and crucial ones. Sitting in a prefabricated hut on the grounds of a former prime minister’s residence, Wilder fears for the future. The theories behind development and the delivery of aid have become more complex and sophisticated all the time, he points out, but they are not matched by performance; disillusion and disappointment fester over how few expectations have been realized. Security, argues Wilder, was always known to be the major issue in Afghanistan: how to make the country safe from the warlords and free of weapons? “Everyone, from Karzai down, knew that security should be addressed first. So what did we do? We provided assistance first, with the assumption that security would follow. It hasn’t.”

On my first day back in Kabul, I found a driver and went out to
the Shomali plain, to see how Haji Kamal and his family had survived the winter. The dog roses were out along the hedgerows and the fields around Logar were full of men working at the grapevines, now watered and primed and sprouting once more. The UN tent had gone. In both Haji Kamal’s compound and that of his cousin Amar Jan, there were signs of building. Seven rooms had been finished, long whitewashed rooms with windows and rafters donated by a foreign aid organization, now furnished with felt carpets and lined with pillows in reds and greens. From the cool of Haji Kamal’s main room, which he has painted a bright blue wash, visitors can look out over pomegranate bushes and chickens pecking in the dirt. There is a new outside bread oven, and a second cow and four sheep have appeared. He told me that all his children and grandchildren who can walk half an hour there and back are at the village school, and he and Amar Jan have planted tomatoes, radishes, potatoes, eggplants, and onions. Along the avenues of mulberries destroyed by the Taliban, new shoots are growing from the stumps of the trees.

Of Logar’s forty original families, all but six have come home. Haji Karnal, the former member of the mujahedeen, is a man of peace now: he talked of his new orchards, of the apples and plums and almonds from which he expects a first crop in three years’ time, and of the lessons he gives his grandchildren about the unexploded mines, still plentiful across his land. But he is pleased, every day, to be home. Not long ago he turned down the offer of a job for his eldest son in Dubai, saying that he no longer wished to have his children live away from him. He fears only the weakness of the central government in Kabul, and the power of the warlords, grown strong and lazy from looting and extortion. “What do I miss from my years in Pakistan? Nothing. There is nothing to miss. I have no single good memory of exile.”