Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (3 page)

For a long time, it didn’t matter what happened. I was high on Afghanistan. The aching beauty of rock and sky, and the thick light smearing everything like honey. The jangle of tongues, confusion of smells, every human enterprise a cheap trifle of origami against this massive, unchanging earth.

War cannot be innocent, but sometimes it is naive. At first the fight in Afghanistan felt finite and comprehensible. There had been an attack, an act of war, and America responded with conventional warfare against an objectively violent and repressive regime. You could disagree with the choice to invade, you could question the sense and bravery of bombing a country built from mud, but at least there was an internal logic, the suggestion of a moral thread, of cause and effect. And
so we plunged forward, and our eyes were bound in gauze. I was acutely aware that in witnessing war I was experiencing something both timeless and particular. I expected awful sights and I accepted them when they came. The war was an adventure and an exhilaration, an ancient, human force that had found its shape for this country, in this age. Perhaps only by comparing it with all that came later can I remember it as naive. Death was everywhere, in the fields full of land mines, the villagers who hobbled without a leg, without an arm, staring from crutches. When I came to Afghanistan I had decided to look at the deaths of others, and to risk my own life. I had expected everything from war, danger and blood and hurt, and the war produced all of it.

Afghans lived on the edge of mortality, its tang hung always in the air, in their words. If death would come to us all, the Afghans couldn’t be bothered to duck. I was interviewing an Afghan commander one afternoon in the mountains when somebody started shooting at us. I backed down the ridge, lowered myself out of the line of fire. “Can you please ask him to come closer so we’re not getting shot at?” I asked the translator. The commander looked at me and laughed. He sauntered slowly down out of the bullets smirking all the way.

“We are dust.” The mujahideen liked to say that.
We are dust
.

One day, a messenger came to the Spin Ghar hotel. Zaman was inviting me back to his house for
iftar
, the sunset meal that broke each day’s fast through the holy month of Ramadan.

Zaman was about to command the ground offensive in Tora Bora and was therefore the closest voice I could find to an American representative. I wanted the story badly enough to return to his turf, but I couldn’t go alone. I needed a foreign man, somebody Zaman would feel tribally compelled to respect. So I invited the AP reporter Chris Tomlinson. “Whatever happens,” I told him, “don’t leave me alone with him.”

A flicker crossed Zaman’s face when he saw Chris. We settled onto velvet cushions, and Zaman’s servants heaped the floor with steaming flatbread, biryani, crisp vegetables, a shank of mutton. Chris and I had our notebooks at our sides, and we jotted away while Zaman held forth on the ground assault.

Suddenly Zaman looked at Chris. “Would you excuse us, please?” he said icily. “We need to talk in private.”

Chris stared at me, telegraphing:
What should I do?

I glowered back:
Don’t leave.

“Um, well,” Chris stammered, eyes flying around the room. He pointed at the door to the terrace. “I’m just going to step outside and smoke a cigarette. I’ll be
right outside
,” he added, looking at me.

As soon as the door closed, Zaman announced, “You’re going back to Pakistan.”

I laughed. “No, I’m not.”

“Yes. My men will take you there.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a joke. I’m not leaving.”

“You can’t stay here anymore. Every time I see you, I forget what I’m doing. You are making me distracted.”

Through the windows, I watched the lone red ember of the cigarette float up and down the terrace.

“I’m sure you can control yourself,” I said slowly, trying to prolong the conversation. He was sliding my way on the cushions, his body closing the distance between us. His eyes were fixed on me, long face like a sly old goat.

“I’m in love with you,” he said. “I love you.”

“You’re not in love with me!” I spat out. “You don’t even know me.”

“I
do
know you,” he assured me.

I looked at him, his gray, dirty hair smashed down from his Afghan cap, lanky limbs swathed in yards of
shalwar kameez
, crouched in slippers on the floor.

“Look, I’m very flattered, but we are from completely different worlds. Where I come from, you can’t just—”

He interrupted me.

“I want to see your world,” he said. “I want to go there. With you. To know your family …”

I imagined Haji Zaman, decked in tribal dress, sipping coffee on my mother’s front porch in Connecticut, faithful AK-47 casually propped against the rocking chair. Haji Zaman and I, holding hands, peering over the rim of the Grand Canyon.

“It’s completely out of the question. And so’s Pakistan.”

With a sheepish look in my direction, Chris returned.

“Thank you very much for dinner,” my words tumbled out. “We have to get going now, to write our stories.”

Zaman protested, but I was already on my feet, swaying unsteadily on the pillows, tugging at the ends of my head scarf. We scrambled down the stairs and burst out into the orchards and vegetable gardens hemming the house, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.

“I can’t believe he left us!”

“It’s not too far back to town,” Chris said. “We can make it walking.”

“Do you remember the way?”

“I think so.”

The black night opened its mouth and swallowed us whole. Darkness quivered before us, taut as a stretched canvas, demanding to be filled. Our feet fumbled forward. I couldn’t remember the way; I hadn’t been paying enough attention. I’d been letting myself get carried along in days, flooded by experience, and now I was lost. Stars glittered overhead, brilliant scattershot. Beyond the road sprawled unseen fields, and land mines festered in the dirt. Figures moved in houses. A flush of light bruised the edges of black in the distance, and we kept walking toward it. The light grew and swelled, a distant peach rising into the night. Finally we could see the road ahead, the lights of cars swimming.

On the road, we flagged down a bicycle taxi. “Spin Ghar hotel, please.” We climbed into the tiny carriage, and the man pedaled off. Everything was color and light, chasing the black from my eyes. Music was playing somewhere, night rushing past. No steel car doors, no glass, no roof split us from the world. The bicycle cab trembled over ruts, plastered with diamond-shaped mirrors, gaudy with pink and blue and yellow paint. Strings of coins jangled as we careened through the electric wildness of open air. The night pressed cool hands against my hot cheeks, ruffled my hair. Wind caught in my throat and then I was laughing, laughing to think that luck can change, just like that. The night was right there, choked with mysteries, shadows sliding down rutted roads, smells of sweet and dank from cooking pots, and the vastness of countryside. For a few minutes, death fell away, and it felt like freedom.

I
t had been weeks since Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, and plans were already under way for a
loya jirga
, the tribal conference that would divide power in post-Taliban Afghanistan. American newspapers and television brimmed with self-congratulatory features: women taking off their burqas, fathers and sons flying kites, little girls heading back to school. But the war was not gone.

There in the east, tension still laced the faces of the triumvirate of warlords who ran the region, each man boss of his own sumptuous headquarters. Every time one of the warlords saw a reporter, he pointedly reminded us that Osama bin Laden and his band of diehards were hiding in the mountains outside of town. They wanted the message to get back to Washington—bin Laden was an American problem, after all, and the United States had just invaded and occupied the country. The warlords were waiting for U.S. money, men, and supplies to flush out Al Qaeda, or so they said. These pleas started out quietly, discreetly. Then Zaman, the most tempestuous of the three, lost his patience and began calling noisily for America to pony up guns and cash. He sent word to the hotel one morning, inviting journalists to a bombed-out military base on the outskirts of Jalalabad. His men hauled an upholstered sofa down into a bomb crater, and Zaman reclined splendidly in the wreckage. We gathered on the rim, peering down at his majesty. The point, I think, was to display the shambles of Afghanistan’s virtually nonexistent military infrastructure.

“We’re just like a new-bought car,” Zaman said that day. “We just need a drop of gas.”

I kept remembering a U.S. official I’d interviewed back in Pakistan, and his palpable distaste for these warlords. “They’re parasites, this is how they make money,” he said. “What they love about foreigners is they can get something and there’s not a lot of likelihood they’ll have to reciprocate. Be it the CIA or whomever. If the CIA gives them a satellite phone they come out [of Afghanistan] and get it, then go back inside and say, ‘Oh, now I need guns.’”

The warlords talked, and then they talked some more. They sent scouts to Tora Bora to spy on “the Arabs.” They muttered through midnight meetings and summoned tribal elders from obscure villages to secure promises of loyalty in the coming battle. They droned on about the victorious ground offensive they would prosecute when they finally sent the mujahideen up into the mountains to track down the terrorists.

Time trickled on. We were all waiting for the war, but it didn’t come. A battle thundered slowly toward us, but it was dreamy, disarming. Like watching a race in slow motion: the leg rises, falls; the action is muddy as hallucination.

One day Hazrat Ali, another warlord making a hard play for U.S. money, wandered through the hotel lobby. A plump, bearded fighter with twinkling eyes and a dramatic flair, Ali lacked Zaman’s gravitas, but he made up for it with moral authority: while Zaman had slunk off to France, Ali stayed put and fought an insurgent war against the Taliban. Now he’d been named local security chief; soon he would rise to power within Hamid Karzai’s government. Reporters clustered around him. The conversation went like this:

“The Taliban was 95 percent of our country,” an Afghan friend told me. “Look around you. We didn’t kill everybody.”

Whenever the translator, Naseer, took me to his house, I could feel the knowledge of Taliban lurking among the women. We’d drop by in the afternoon, and I’d sit for a time with these spectacular women, their cheeks and eyes full of light. They fussed over me, flounced around, touched my hands and my face, giggled and cooed. I was a piece of the world, delivered to them in their cloisters, and although we could not trade a word, they lavished me with emotion. Their husbands were doctors and merchants and engineers, but none of these women had the equivalent of a middle-school education.

In the middle of fruitless pantomime, Naseer’s niece turned on him one day. “You know English, and you never taught us!” she lashed out, eyes narrow in her face. Her name was Rina. She was fifteen years old, already promised in marriage to a cousin. “You should have taught us English!”

These women had been waiting in these dim rooms for years, waiting so long that they had turned anticipation into a state of grace. They had waited for the neighborhood schools to reopen, for permission to show their faces in public, and for the right to walk out the front gate to the mud road. Waited for decades of war to pass out of these valleys and farms, for one government after the next to swell and crumble, for untested men to rush forward to unleash new laws. They learned from the BBC’s scratchy Pashto-language service that the Taliban was gone, but so what? Still they waited for their world to change. The women in Naseer’s house were not liberated beings. They couldn’t remember the last time they shopped in the bazaar, or ate a picnic, or strolled in a park. They couldn’t even buy their own vegetables. They had learned their lesson swiftly when the Taliban took over.

“We knew they hated women, and we were afraid,” Naseer’s wife,
Sediqa, told me. “They said we had to wear our burqas, so we wore them. But they beat us anyway. We knew it wasn’t safe to go out into the streets.”

Everybody remembered keenly the day in 1996 when the seventy-five-year-old matriarch next door set out across town to visit her daughter. She had no money for a taxi, so she walked. The Taliban hadn’t been in power long, and Afghans were still discovering restrictions by trial and error. The old woman didn’t wear a burqa, because she was frail and nearsighted and the netted face covering was uncomfortable. She was halted by the religious police, who hollered that her robes and head scarf were immodest, that she was violating the laws of Islam. They beat her with lead rods and bamboo canes, dragged her home bruised and bloodied, and scolded the family for letting the woman wander the streets without proper dress. After that, by their own will or by mandate of their husbands, all the women on Naseer’s street were locked away.

“I knew then that I hated the Taliban, and they were different. Other times, things had been bad. But nobody had beaten an old woman before,” the woman’s daughter told me. She had slipped into Naseer’s house, curious to visit with the American.

Sitting on mattresses on the floor with these women, I felt that I had tunneled deep down into the middle of the earth. Their tiny universe—tight rooms with dirt floors strung around a muddy courtyard—felt sealed off from Jalalabad. This was only the first layer of withdrawal: Jalalabad was far removed from Kabul, and Kabul from the rest of the world. Still, because of September 11, Americans were aware of the women who dwelled in this forgotten place. Worse, popular imagination back home already considered them liberated by U.S. benevolence. As if the freedom of these women, caught in the strings of their marriages, family honor, tribal code, and morality police, could come so cheap. I got Naseer to translate our conversations, and I learned that the women themselves knew better; knew enough not to get excited. They stayed put in the world they’d hollowed out for their families. When they heard that Americans thought they’d been freed, they frowned in befuddlement.