His previous experience with outsiders came from fourteen years of Russian occupation. They were easier to contend with because the sight of them was never anything but bad news. However, when a stranger shows courtesy and kindness to an Afghan, going out of their way to offer help, they activate a code of Afghan behavior that obligates a person to respond in kind and to treat that stranger as a friend.
But the code was meant for ancient nomad tribes, while these Americans were there as an army. Even if they could be friends to him, Hasan knew that all armies serve nations that are run by politicians—meaning those same armies are sometimes ordered to kill their friends.
Centuries of constant invasions across Afghanistan by marauding hordes had left the locals convinced that only a fool trusts anybody wearing a uniform. He fought the urge to cut and run. It wasn’t all the papers that they kept making him sign which bothered him; his experience with pieces of paper was that they didn’t mean a thing. The signing of papers seemed more like some sort of cultural practice nearly worshipped by the Americans, so he tried to go along out of respect for these foreign ways without worrying too much about whatever was on the pages.
Hasan’s dilemma was eased by the knowledge that he was out of options. And so far, at least, the American was treating him as a friend. The code of honor that guided the lives of Hasan’s people obligated him to rise to the moment and accept the hospitality without questioning the soldier’s motives.
After all, even though he was here in this partially Westernized city, he was still an Afghan, one of the four great tribes whose lands cover much of what a bunch of Western politicians once decided to call Afghanistan. The local code of law, called
Pashtun-wali,
has dictated behavior for centuries. It originated with the majority Pushtun (or “Pashtun”) ethnic group, but today dominates the land, regardless of an individual’s tribal identity. All personal conduct and social interaction is guided by these unwritten laws, and they are impressed upon every child as soon as they are able to understand them. The code has successfully bound the tribes of Afghanistan to their common culture, in spite of the distances and separations created by their nomadic wanderings, and it has done so for longer than anyone knows.
And so in Mohammed Hasan’s life, there really were only two kinds of people: those who ascribe to the
Pashtun-wali—
and the Others. Most of his concept of the Others was based upon the nearly fifteen years spent in bitter guerilla warfare against the invading Soviet Army—that, and a few random encounters with Europeans of one race or another over the years.
Experience had clearly revealed to him that sometimes the Others were honorable, almost as if they had a
Pashtun-wali
of their own, but just as often the Others could suddenly change their minds and follow some other “law.” This new and different “law” might very well make it all right for them to harm you, or even take your life and the lives of everyone around you. The Others were distinguished by their need to assault you with disrespect and to deal in tricks and lies.
The representatives of the Soviets had used their words for “law” like that, all through the years of their occupation of Afghanistan. That made it easy for the locals to kill them without regret until the Soviet generals finally realized that the tribal people have been successfully fighting off invaders for centuries. Call them the “Soviets,” but Hasan’s years of hardscrabble living in a permanent combat zone had made it plain to him that the real enemy of his homeland was “The Great Russian Bear.” This same Bear had already devoured many of the other sovereign nations in that part of the world, bowling over the land’s people like any sane man would hesitate to do.
The men of Hasan’s province all fought like wild animals who cared nothing for the fear of death, but were who also smart enough to remember that a fighter who dies tomorrow can do more damage than a fighter who dies today. The
Pashtun-Wali
clearly dictates that the strongest and more fierce opposition possible is the only acceptable reaction when a lethal affront is committed upon one’s family, or worse, one’s homeland, or worse still, one’s sacred religious sites.
The Great Russian Bear had launched staggering and repeated assaults upon all three. They had every reason to believe that victory was their for the taking. They continually captured and tortured a leading officer into declaring a “surrender” of his men, only to find that if the men didn’t like what their commander told them, they might ignore him, or maybe shoot him, or perhaps—as in this case—abandon him to his captors. Thus the Others could never find out who was actually directing the resistance. The Soviet tanks would roll and the Soviet infantry repeatedly crushed entire “armies” of insurgents, only to find that that “army” was actually just an urban militia made up of local men. The estimates of their number were overblown because of the extreme violence employed by these men who were fighting for their mud-brick homes and their little shops in the
bazaar
and their wives and the children who depended upon them. The Soviets did not doubt that they could eventually win, so they stayed longer than the U.S. was in Viet Nam. Still, the great Soviet Army eventually went away, beaten and licking their wounds.
The Americans, though, they were new to Hasan. He realized that their military had the power to cause any sort of trouble that they wanted to make, so he would have to wait and see whether or not these new pink and brown-skinned strangers were nothing more than different versions of the Others.
* * *
The anonymous Green Beret soldier dropped off the girl and her father for a check-up with a Special Forces medic at the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. It would later be explained that the U.S. Army medic, operating under a back-unit combat situation and with constant terrorist concerns, only agreed to see a civilian father/daughter in the first place because the Green Beret expressed concern that she might be a victim of U.S. operations. The Green Beret, experienced in The Army Way, may have done this knowing that that as soon as a file was created on the girl, it would be much easier to pass her on up the army hospital chain to whatever sort of specialists she needed to see. It was a point of subtlety that did nothing less than make every single event possible that followed down the long and invisible domino chain. Otherwise, the direct approach and “the Army way” would likely have done nothing more than get him a face full of regulations and a quick ejection out the back gate.
By the time the day was over, the father and daughter had already been guaranteed enough medical help to at least address her immediate infections. That treatment alone might require days or even weeks before her underlying injuries could even be addressed, but at least that much was coming their way now.
The cautiously grateful father took his daughter off to secure guest lodgings for a long stay, after the medics made sure that he understood them well enough to return with the girl at the right time and place.
The few dollars quietly pressed into his hands were enough to help Hasan and his daughter stretch their small sum of traveling money, for the moment. And even though ancient Kandahar was not their home, they would not be without resources in that place—every great mosque in Afghanistan has a guest house dedicated to maintaining the custom of hospitality to wanderers, in this land that has always been a crossroads for nomads.
Back on the U.S. base, neither the first soldier to meet them, the first medic to treat the girl, nor the first officer to put out a few quiet inquiries on her behalf had any way of knowing what they were starting. Nobody had enough of her story to form any sort of grand plan out of it. There was only the sight of one girl’s catastrophic injuries, witnessed by common soldiers and military doctors who all know the pain of physical trauma far too well.
Once Hasan and his daughter were taken into the medical system, her father didn’t need to plead for her. The sharp awareness in her eyes contrasted with the ruined state of her body to form a statement that none of the soldiers were willing to ignore. By the time the girl’s story traveled far enough up the food chain to garner some inevitable bureaucratic backlash, an invisible but compelling momentum had already formed around her.
She would need every bit of it; the potential for trouble over her was enormous—not only was it less than five months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, but bombers and cruise missiles were still pounding Afghanistan’s mountain hideouts in search of Osama Bin Laden, chasing shadows through the countryside. Rumors of impending terrorist assaults on Americans and their Middle East bases were suspended in the dust and inhaled with the heat.
For the U.S. forces, reliable knowledge of the enemy’s ways was still in its early stages. Would the extremists be willing to use a child such as this, to gain on-base access to U.S. forces?
And since the Afghani civil record keeping system was nearly nonexistent out in the war-torn provinces, the question had to be asked—was this man who called himself “Mohammed Hasan” really even the dying girl’s father?
The U.S. military policy against allowing their fighting forces to be become bogged down in local humanitarian activities has plenty of justification, because even once the inherent security issues are resolved—assuming that security issues can ever be resolved by occupying forces—there is not only the lack of local infrastructure to house and feed those that the military would help, but every hour expended upon a local civilian would be one less hour available to the very American soldiers for whom those medical facilities exist.
Therefore, even if the giant logistical questions of how to physically care for local civilians could be addressed—assuming that they could ever be addressed in a country the size of the state of Texas, with twenty-five million natives and a poverty stricken economy broken by decades of violent homeland fighting—there would still be the thorny issue of preference.
How are those to be helped initially chosen? Who does the choosing? How would the U.S. Army doctors handle the political fallout when charges of favoritism are inevitably raised by disappointed applicants? How, in short, do you keep from causing more trouble than you are trying to fix in the first place?
Every soldier and military doctor who met Zubaida over the next few weeks knew all of these Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved. None of them needed to be reminded that if somebody up at Central Command got wind of what they were doing and decided to make an issue of it, the soldiers could easily find that CentCom can make permanent trouble for them. They could wind up having accomplished nothing more than jeopardizing their careers while still failing to get the girl’s health into a survivable condition before they were ordered to break off contact with her family.
But the unseen momentum rising up underneath all of those Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved had already grown too strong to hold back.
* * *
Mike Smith was a U.S. Army physician stationed in the capital city of Kabul when he got notice of Zubaida’s case. It was almost immediately after she entered the system in Kandahar. Her files were transmitted to him along with a set of digital photos. What he saw there stopped him in his tracks.
Smith’s official position toward any local medical case was the same as the one constraining the Special Forces soldiers; his primary mission was military in nature—helping to oversee medical services provided for American soldiers whose only purpose in that country was to kill Taliban insurgents and topple their regime. Like the soldiers, he had an obligation to resist any abuse of medical services.
However, this anti-Taliban war was taking place amid the new technology of digital photography and the internet, and it was the photos that convinced him.
He contacted Robert Frame, a U.S. Army colonel who worked in the region to coordinate the activities of the Civil Affairs units that secured the interests of the local civilian population. Frame’s job function straddled the needs of the peaceful local civilians on one hand and the obligation to protect the soldiers under him. For him, the Hasan story raised potential security issues of nightmarish proportion.
What if,
in attempt to respond humanely to this little girl’s plight, he unintentionally aided a terrorist who could be using an injured girl as a calling card to pass American checkpoints? Was it unreasonable to fear such a thing, he wondered, following the success of the 9/11 hijackers in capitalizing on American openness? The luxury of a purely humanitarian response was something he simply couldn’t indulge.
The Perfectly Good Reasons not to get involved with Hasan and his daughter hung over him like knives on threads.
Even so, the photos were more than he could ignore. He booked a trip to Kandahar and brought an able translator to help him interview the pair in person.
It only took one visit. After that, Frame helped balance Mike Smith’s need to maintain consistent medical treatment for Zubaida’s wound infections with the humanitarian side of taking care of the political and logistical realities behind taking two locals into the military system. A large part of his job was to see to it that he did nothing to invoke a backlash of outrage among so many other needy people in that impoverished country.
Quietly, using informal means of communication, word of the Zubaida case reached the State Department in Washington. Officials at Central Command in Florida contacted the state department about this sticky medical/political case.