The Underground Girls of Kabul (33 page)

Ashamed, she stayed inside the house in Badghis.

When she reluctantly turned her cell phone back on, messages had piled up from supporters, urging her not to throw in the towel. “Everyone” knew there had been foul play, they said. And they knew her not as a quitter who would buckle under corrupt Afghan politics but as a leader who stood for something—was that not exactly what she had told her constituents so many times over? They had gone to the polls for her and would not accept her just folding in the face of some blanket wipeout of votes due to the alleged fraud of others. Of course she had been cheated of her seat; more of the clean votes belonged to her. Unlike many of the others, she had not even been accused of fraud herself. Or did she in fact mean to tell her supporters that their votes were now suddenly worth nothing?

Slowly, Azita came around.

“It’s the right of the people who voted for me to see me fight for this. It’s a competition, and I won fairly,” she told herself.

The image of her daughters back in a Badghis mud house also filled her with determination. They were Kabul girls now, who could make something of their lives. She would not do to them what was once done to her: Invite them to a better life and then exile them back to a province with little prospect of a decent education or a chance to escape an early marriage to a villager. Besides, Azita thought, she had run a clean campaign, so how hard could it be to prove that those additional votes were rightfully hers?

Together with hundreds of other candidates who disputed the election results, she decided to go into battle.

In all, a third of the country’s original candidates became
embroiled in a heated national conflict, either as contested winners or as runners-up, claiming more votes should be counted toward their own results, or fewer to that of others’ results. In the meantime, Afghanistan was left with a frozen, inactive parliament and a crisis for the fragile, untested democracy.

At first, through chaotic official hearings and in the backroom negotiations Azita attended, she was told her chances of a favorable recount were good. They would increase, however, if she paid a fee of $60,000 to certain officials who handled the process. That could even reinstate her without any further queries, she learned. Several colleagues confirmed to her it was indeed the going rate; some even advised her to consider it. It was a small fee to pay to get her job back, suggested one of the officials when she argued that her higher vote count was indeed valid to begin with. She would soon make that kind of money–and more–in her salaried position of power, and by charging those who wanted to pay for the right decisions a little on the side.

“If I even had that money I would give it to the widows,” Azita shot back at him before storming out of his office.

At another visit with an official, he suggested she could sign a debt letter toward future income or assets. Several others had done just that, she was told. Surely she, or perhaps her father, had some land that she could put up as collateral? When Azita declined, she was called “a very silly woman.” After that, several officials advised her to “just forget about it.” Without an “investment” and some good faith money, she was informed it would be difficult to enter parliament again.

Spurred on by the resistance from officials searching to enrich themselves in the political turmoil, Azita put even more energy into tracing her votes and trying to prove their legitimacy. That promise of a new country that had appeared on the horizon when the Taliban first left still resonated deeply with her a decade later. She had not already spent five years in parliament just to sidestep the courts and the
official justice system. And regardless of any respect for democracy, she simply did not have the money either.

But now, she was without an income and an office. With little savings, keeping the family afloat in Kabul was becoming harder by the week. Eventually her husband weighed in: This struggle to get back into parliament did not seem to be very fruitful, and it was taking too long. It was time to let go, he argued. They should move back to Badghis, or at least to Herat, where they could live like a normal family again.

It was unthinkable for Azita, who despite her setbacks had grown absolutely certain she should be reinstated as a Badghis representative to Kabul.

Again, she turned to her father and asked him to broker an agreement with her husband; she needed another few months to battle the election commission. Her husband agreed to extend their stay in Kabul, to await the final decision from officials on the makeup of parliament. In return, Azita said she would get a temporary job to support the family while she saw the legal process through.

She would continue, however, to spend almost every day immersed in meetings with election officials, carrying her ragged paper dossier between the ministries, courts, and informal gatherings with colleagues, while telling her family and friends “I am my own lawyer. But I have my supporters. The first is Allah. The second is my people.”

F
INDING A JOB
also proved harder than she had thought. It had become an issue of appearance. A public, high-paying job would potentially make people think she had given up on reentering parliament. A low-paying job would make her seem like a definite loser, which would not work to her advantage in her legal skirmishes either. Regardless, most of her energy went into the legal struggle, and it was not as though anyone were clamoring for her to work for them, either.

As the first months of 2011 went by, her savings ran out. She began
to take small loans where she could—from her father, her brother, and from a few friends in politics. She made them promise not to talk about it with others.

The last of her saved money had gone to resettling the family in Golden City, a Pashtun-dominated development at the outskirts of Kabul. The Dubai-inspired houses rose up during Kabul’s development mania that followed a massive influx of money in the past decade. At first the buildings had been painted a luxuriously golden yellow that blazed toward the main road leading into the neighborhood. But a few years of desert winds soon sandpapered them into a more matte exterior and now paint was chipping away from the hallways inside.

Golden City has no playground and no football field. There are no trees, or even a patch of green anywhere to be seen. Not that there is a need, either: Children of the mostly conservative Pashtun families who live here are not allowed outside to play much. Azita’s husband has decided that their children—including Mehran—must stay inside after school. It’s not safe to go out anymore, even for an hour here and there. The children do not have many friends in the new place either, and they left their old ones behind in Macroyan.

Now, every day except Friday consists of the same routine for them: School starts at 7 a.m.; return by midday to do homework, napping, dinner, and then bed. Any play takes place on the apartment’s small balcony, but mostly, the children just watch cable television or pirated DVDs, from which the twins can quote most lines by now. Fights flare up more often during the hot summer months, when they circle one another like caged animals in and out of the apartment’s small rooms.

But Azita tries to be upbeat and is eager to show off everything that is new when I meet her in the new apartment for the first time, after she has spent months in Badghis and I have been out of the country.

There are wall-to-wall Oriental carpets and thick yellow curtains in every room. There’s a dishwasher, an electric oven, and a microwave in the kitchen. A pink porcelain bathroom. Not one but two television sets in the living room. The two wives each have a bedroom.
As before, the children share a bedroom. Azita has installed a modern weight-training machine in the children’s room. She is planning to lose the weight soon.

A few more of her French-manicured fingers now glimmer with Saudi gold. Her wrists are wrapped in twisted yellow bands, and heavy pearl earrings weigh down her earlobes. That, too, is from the borrowed money. The added bling and the apartment are a careful investment effort, she explains. Around Kabul, appearance is everything, and no one will trust someone who looks like she is on the way out. Visitors still come to their home, and they need to be assured she is still a player. She needs to come off as worldly and sophisticated and confident; as someone who has a rightful place in the national parliament. And, in truth, buying things helps stave off anxiety, she has discovered.

She shrugs when I ask how it can be sustainable without a salary. It’s not. Money will need to come from somewhere. Soon.

Ironically, among those who seem not to have fully noticed her setbacks are the threat mongers. They want to make sure she does
not
return to politics. The anonymous calls keep coming, with the message that she needs to stop insisting she should be in parliament. She should behave like a normal woman before God, the callers propose, by staying home. That is, however, not Azita’s idea of what God wants for women, and it’s not what she wants for herself, either. But the confidence she built while she was in power is harder to challenge now, and only moderately helped by her gold-plated appearance: “Now I take taxis and people do not even greet me anymore,” she admits as we sit on pillows, having tea on her bedroom floor. “I feel worthless. I moralize myself up, and then I get down. I get negative ideas in my head that I can’t get rid of. I can’t focus.”

She begins to rise from the floor, to go and change into the all-black clothing for a meeting at the Ministry of Defense. But the four cell phones on the floor between us come alive at the same time. My text message is in all caps:

“ALERT: 1215H EXPLOSION NEAR MOD. AVOID THE AREA.”

As soon as a major blast goes off anywhere in Kabul, text messages ripple through the cellular networks, as anyone with a phone tries to ensure the safety of their friends, relatives, and colleagues. With one phone in each hand, Azita and I both perform the same routine, confirming back to each sender that we are nowhere near the Ministry of Defense, which is now under attack. More detailed messages filter in and we take turns filling each other in: A suicide bomber entered the ministry by disguising himself as an Afghan army officer in uniform. Once inside, he shot his way up toward his third-floor target—the minister’s office. He then blew himself up in such a way as to maim and kill as many as possible around him. The minister himself appears to have survived, but the total number of fatalities is yet unknown.

After a few minutes of texting, we put our phones down. Azita’s second meeting of the day is canceled. She does not mention her close call. It is one of many that have come before. We both know it means neither of us will be going anywhere before roadblocks are cleared. It also means we have more time for tea.

Azita looks down, quietly picking at a piece of cake. It is the
bloodiest year yet of the war: American troop losses will reach new highs, and the war will claim the most civilians since counting of them began. In the capital, suicide blasts, kidnappings for ransom, and targeted killings are a regular occurrence.

“This is Kabul now,” she says.

A
ROUND THIS TIME
, the military and diplomatic corps in Kabul still officially upheld a rather optimistic view of developments in Afghanistan. But in private, by 2011, many had already lost much of their initial enthusiasm for whether the war could be “won,” or how Afghanistan would reach some semblance of peace.

President Obama’s two-year “surge” of thirty thousand additional troops meant to quash the insurgency, quickly followed by the announcement of a withdrawal by 2014, had ultimately not prevented
various Islamic militants, warlords, criminal networks, and Taliban-affiliated groups from boldly expanding in several provinces. Expensive American efforts to train and equip Afghan government troops to defend their own country still did not prevent the Taliban from successfully widening their territory by aligning with locals and criminal networks, fueled by the ever-expanding opium trade.

And inside the armor-clad and tank-protected enclave of the capital, suicide bombers found new ways to infiltrate and induce terror, at times blasting themselves in pairs, followed by fighters who could hold out for hours, occupying buildings and shutting down entire areas of the city. Rockets were regularly launched at government buildings and even reached as far as the well-protected U.S. Embassy.

Those who could afford protection responded by erecting ever higher walls around themselves.

The pace at which the remaining low-key, elegant 1950s Kabul villas were turning into indistinguishable cement-gray fortresses seemed to increase exponentially for every month with the waning interest of the Western world. One row of sandbags for blast protection became two; those who once employed two guards hired four; and a thick steel door was the new standard. More small huts with security guards for body searches popped up outside houses and hotels, and every tree seemed to be ensnarled in razor wire, preventing both humans and stray cats from getting onto the high walls.

But officially ending America’s longest war, with a price tag of upward of
$700 billion and counting to American taxpayers, and with its many changing narratives—from “rooting out” terrorism to just fighting the Taliban in general—had become a political necessity back in the United States.

Fear of what would come next was all over Kabul. Those speaking for the foreign military dropped the word “victory” in favor of the more ambiguous “exit,” with the silent understanding that battles would most likely continue to rage in some form, ranging from a complete descent into civil war or a full-fledged, lawless narco state, to warlords dividing up provinces through regional battles. The
United States and its allies, however, could no longer afford to be much involved.

What Sherard Cowper-Coles, British ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009, writes in his memoir echoes Russian accounts of their journey into the harsh and mountainous country that refused to be conquered or controlled: